Raising Awareness of the Benefits of Hospice and Palliative Care

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Angela Hospice Celebrates November 
as National Hospice and Palliative Care Month

Throughout the month of November, Angela Hospice joins organizations across the nation in recognizing National Hospice and Palliative Care Month.

For more than 40 years, hospices have helped provide comfort and dignity to millions of people, allowing them to spend their final months at home, surrounded by their loved ones. Hospices ensure that pain management, therapies, and treatments all support a plan of care that is centered on the patient’s individual goals. This care also provides emotional support and advice to help family members become confident caregivers, and adjust to the future with grief support for over a year.

Angela Hospice volunteers circa 1986.
“It is essential that people understand that hospice and palliative care is not giving up, it is not the abandonment of care, and it is not reserved for the imminently dying,” said Edo Banach, president and CEO of the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization. “Hospice is a successful model of person-centered care that brings hope, dignity, and compassion when they are most needed.”

Every year, nearly 1.5 million Medicare beneficiaries receive care from hospices in this country, reports NHPCO. Hospice is unique in that it offers an interdisciplinary team approach to treatment. Caring for the whole person allows the team to address each patient’s unique needs and challenges.

Marti Coplai
“As hospice professionals we have to set our own experiences aside and our own values, and determine what it is that that individual and that family needs and wants, and tailor our support to that,” said Marti Coplai, Angela Hospice president and CEO. “Our goal always is to bring everybody to a peaceful place, where the highest quality of life can happen for the patient and for the family that is supporting them.”

Hospices are also some of the best providers of community-based palliative care. Angela Hospice officially launched its Palliative Care program earlier this year. Palliative care delivers expertise to improve quality of life and relief from pain. It can be provided at any time during an illness, from diagnosis on.

More information about hospice, palliative care, and advance care planning is available from AskForAngela.com or from NHPCO’s CaringInfo.org.

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