Confronting a life-limiting illness is stressful, but you don’t need to face it alone. Skirball Hospice brings comfort care to adults in the greater Los Angeles area, allowing you to remain home in a familiar, reassuring environment with family, friends, and pets. We support and assist you, your family and caregivers with compassion and clinical expertise.
Is it too early to consider hospice?
Hospice care is palliative*, not curative in goals and treatments. Referrals are usually made when a life-limiting condition is believed to be advancing, when medical intervention has reached its maximum benefit, and when you or your representative decide to focus on maintaining comfort and symptom management at home rather than in the hospital. We don’t seek to prolong life beyond its natural course, nor does our involvement hasten death in any way.
Admission to hospice is voluntary and is generally intended to be about a six-month program. Your prognosis is reviewed every two or three months, and you may discontinue hospice if your condition has stabilized or you decide to pursue additional treatment.
What types of care does Hospice provide?
Routine care provides you and your primary caregiver with supportive, intermittent visits, as well as supplies, equipment, personal care, medications, instruction, and critical emotional and spiritual support. We help strategize for your unique circumstances to access the resources required. Should the patient require additional part time or full time support in the home, we will assist in finding that help. However, hospice does not supply or pay for that care. Long term care insurance or in-home support services through Medi-Cal may defray some of the cost.
Crisis care is a short-term provision for a minimum of eight hours or more of daily nursing care. These hours can be continuous or broken up within a 24-hour period. Crisis care may be provided in your home or care facility when it is deemed necessary by the team for acute symptom management or in the face of a family crisis. The goal of crisis care is to stabilize your condition or family situation and then return to routine home care.
Respite care is designed to give your primary caregiver a short period of relief from caregiving. This is provided in a nursing facility and can last up to five days. All costs are covered by hospice.
General inpatient care is the most intensive level of care and is provided in a skilled nursing facility or hospital. The purpose is to provide around the clock skilled nursing to control your pain or symptoms that cannot be managed effectively in any other setting.
How is hospice different from other types of health care?
- Hospice offers palliative*, rather than curative treatment.
- Hospice treats the person, not the disease.
- Hospice emphasizes quality of life, rather than length of life.
- Hospice considers the unit of care to be you, your family, and your caregivers.
- Hospice offers help and support to you and your family on a 24 hour/day, 7 day/week basis.
- Hospice utilizes a core of volunteers that provide at minimum 5% of the direct patient care.
* Palliative care is a specialized medical approach to optimize quality of life by anticipating (or preventing) and treating pain and suffering. Palliative care focuses on your immediate needs rather than high technology interventions as an illness progresses.
