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 Ho...

Mary (far right) with her three sisters and her dad, Norman. For Mary Jardine having her dad’s hospice care set up in the living room made life a little easier, and a little funnier. “It was just funny because it was like a drive-through,” she laughed. “It’s a family joke. That’s how we (the family) get through a lot of things; we have to have a sense of humor.” Laughter is after all the best medicine, and one that’s helped Mary and her family after the passing of her dad, Norman. Norman was an Angela Hospice patient for about a month-and-a-half before dying in August, a day before his 88 th birthday. While Norman, who had diabetes and dementia, lived with Mary, it was her other sister, a nurse, who often took him to his doctor appointments and noticed how rapidly he was losing weight. Mary said that her sister talked to the doctor about hospice and then took the necessary steps to see if Norman qualified, which he did. Angela Hospice started coming to the house...

By: Dana Casadei, Angela Hospice volunteer November for many is the month with Thanksgiving. For some, it's the month when it's finally time to put up their holiday decorations. But for the hospice community, November is a time to raise awareness. Started in 1992, long after the first Thanksgiving, November became the National Hospice and Palliative Care month. The number of hospices in the United States has speedily grown since the first hospice was founded in 1974. That includes Livonia’s Angela Hospice, which was founded 11 years later in 1985. In 2013 more than 1.5-million patients received services from one of 5,800 hospices nationwide. Angela Hospice served 1,760 of those patients. While the numbers for 2014 haven't been totaled yet, Agnes Chor's husband John was one of this year's many patients that received care. During his one month and three days in the Angela Hospice Care Center, Agnes spent nearly every night with him, making it a home a...