Fraud Blocker Palliative Care | Care Mountain | Quality In-Home Care for Seniors

Palliative Care Service

Since 2004, Care Mountain has been providing private duty in home care, and has supplemented in home hospice care to many clients. Hospice care is palliative and comfort care focused on quality of life and not necessarily its length – these two are different and understanding their subtle differences is important for how do you as a client or family member properly plan to address your specific care needs:
For most people, their hospice benefits in the beginning, will cover just a few short in and out visits a week mainly for bathing assistance. For those with dementia for example, they may need a home care aide to be there more time at this point. In either scenario, hospice or palliative care alone may not be enough. For almost everyone, hospice care will be covered under the Medicare Hospice Benefit, Medicaid Hospice Benefit or through a private insurer. No matter the source of payment coverage you have, it is likely your care needs may extend beyond your policy coverage, which is where private duty in home care companies such as Care Mountain can help. If you see that your current hospice insurance benefits do not fully cover your current in home care needs, then you have the right to seek out private duty home care to help cover any home care gaps.

Care Mountain has worked with many wonderful local hospice agencies such as Vitas Healthcare, Kindred Hospice, Encompass, VNA, Heart to Heart Hospice and Interim Healthcare.

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There are a lot of caregivers with an excellent reputation of helping their clients rehabilitate from an illness and maximize independence. For these caregivers, hospice care is liking giving up on their client, which is just not in their DNA to do so. These types of caregivers usually do NOT work well within a hospice care team, and can create unnecessary stress on their client or their families at a time they are least able to cope with it.

When it comes to planning a combination of caregiving through hospice or palliative care, and in home care, here are a few key things to keep in mind that we believe are super critical

  • Ensure your private duty caregiver or in home care agency’s caregiver has demonstrated the ability to work well on a care team. Over the years, we have met many caregivers that are outstanding when working in isolation with a client, but do not work well with other members on a care team – this is the most important part when you combine hospice and in home care.
  • Ensure your private duty caregiver has some hospice care experience, and is knowledgeable about hospice care guidelines and practices. A caregiver lacking in hospice care knowledge and experience could inadvertently perform care that gets you bumped off your hospice care program. For example, here in Texas when working with hospice care companies they ask that you call them before you call 911 in an emergency.
  • The hospice comfort kit that remains in your home while on hospice is a key part of your hospice care, so you will want to know to what extent your private duty caregiver has experience with one and can utilize yours – some state licensing regulations will limit the extent to which certain individuals can use this kit.