Hospice Affiliate Partnerships
Ultimate Care, Comfort, & Peace of Mind
Affiliate Partners working to ensure your comfort.
From our offices in Buda, Texas, Progressive via its affiliated partners provides hospice care (also known as palliative care) for patients with advanced illnesses and for their families. Hospice is the philosophy that people facing advanced terminal disease should have every opportunity to enjoy life to the fullest and to have dignity and comfort in every day of life.
Hospice is also a healthcare program wherein patients in the advanced stages of terminal disease receive as much care as possible in the comfort of home, and this care focuses on symptom management, supporting the family, comfort, quality of life, and dignity.
Progressive partners provide hospice in same coverage areas as Progressive Home Health Agency. Our hospice partners’ team includes more than 100 caring professionals, many bi-lingual, and all ready to provide comprehensive, coordinated, compassionate and responsive service.
How We Help You
Under the direction of your doctor or our medical director, Progressive hospice partners listed below develop a personalized plan of physical, emotional, and spiritual care. This plan is flexible and designed to be adjusted as a patient’s need changes.
Nursing:
Nurses provide a wide variety of hands-on medical care and skilled teaching. This may include advanced pain control, other symptom management, nutritional intervention, and more.
Aides:
Trained and experienced home care aides provide personal care including bathing, changing linens, light housework, and more.
Caregiver Training:
With the right support, a family usually wants to be involved in the care of a loved one with an advanced illness. Our nurses and aides take the time to train family caregivers in all skills important to the care of the loved one. This may include managing home infusion, watching for signs and symptoms, how to help a person walk safely, how to change bed linens with a loved one is still in the bed and a very wide variety of skills as needed by the family.
Care Planning:
Progressive’s affiliated partner’s hospice nurses or social workers can help with care planning issues such as managing insurance benefits, power of attorney forms, DNR orders, and other concerns.
Pastoral Counselor:
When desired by a patient, Progressive Hospice Partners can send a pastoral counselor to help both patients and family with emotional and spiritual support.
Therapy Services:
Speech, occupational, and physical therapy can visit a hospice patient’s home as needed to help with adaptive equipment, feeding challenges, and other issues.
Volunteers:
Trained volunteers serve as an invaluable part of the hospice team. They can help with companionship, emotional support, and support with household chores so that patients and family can better focus on their quality time together.
If you are interested in volunteering to help families in hospice, please contact us for more information.
The Progressive Advantage
When the time is right, Progressive’s hospice care partners provide a number of advantages to patients and families.
Quality of Life:
When doctors are offering a prognosis of six months or less, research consistently shows that home hospice care delivers a higher family-rated quality of life than other healthcare routes.
Improved Symptom Control:
Hospice specializes in enhanced control of serious symptoms in advanced disease. Research demonstrates that home hospice services do a better job of controlling most symptoms than other care settings including the hospital and nursing home.
Comfort and Convenience:
During advanced illness, without hospice, trips to the emergency room, hospital admissions, and nursing home admissions can be frequent.
Home hospice nursing enables patients to spend more time in the privacy and comfort of home in the company of loved ones.
Improved Bereavement Status:
Hospice care offers important emotional support for both patient and family. Additionally, home hospice allows family caregivers to participate in the care of a loved one, but with enough support so that quality time can be spent with the loved one as well. Research demonstrates that this type of support improves the emotional health of spouses during and after bereavement.
Length of Life:
People often assume that when curative treatment ends, life must shorten.
When your doctor’s prognosis is six months or less, research actually demonstrates that hospice services tend to increase the length of life from days to months – while also increasing a family-rated quality of life scores.
It turns out that symptom control and emotional support can give patients more strength and endurance than usual care or aggressive curative treatments – when the timing is right.
Improved Medicare Coverage:
Because Progressive Home Health Agency’s Hospice partners are Medicare-certified, Medicare will pay 100% of charges for your hospice care.
As you might expect, this includes the services of nurses, therapists, social workers, aides, and the supplies they use when delivering care. Hospice partners can also include in the Medicare-covered charges medical equipment, medical supplies, and medication as long as it is related to the hospice diagnosis.
Medicare will pay 100% of Progressive’s charges for all of this with no copay, no deductible, and no cost sharing to a hospice patient or family.
When Is It Best To Start Hospice Care?
Hospice is a service for people with an advanced terminal disease. However, families should begin gathering information on hospice as soon as a family member is diagnosed with a terminal disease such as heart failure, COPD, dementia, or a type of cancer for which there is no cure.
By learning about hospice before hospice is actually needed, patients will be better prepared to elect hospice at the time that is right for them.
While the trend is that doctors are becoming more proactive about this aspect of patient education, past surveys suggest strongly that different doctors handle this type of information differently. Families should not assume that their doctor will initiate conversations about end-of-life care or end-of-life decision-making in a timely fashion.
You need to be proactive about starting conversations with doctors to discuss whether you want to know your prognosis and about questions surrounding hospice care. Families can also schedule a no-cost, no-obligation appointment with a Progressive Case Manager to explore options. We can meet in our office, in your home, at your doctor’s office, or even in your hospital room.
Under Medicare program criteria, hospice is an option when a doctor gives a prognosis of six months or less. A prognosis is only an educated guess based on a patient’s current condition and the normal course of a disease.
Every patient’s experience with a disease will be his or her individual experience, and choices in care become personal decisions based on a number of personal factors. When people choose hospice, it is usually because the rigors of curative treatments are no longer worth the outcomes in the patient’s estimation and/or because the doctor(s) have explained that the best course of action is to focus on symptom control.
Research suggests that patients and families are most satisfied with their overall care (including the care from their doctors and hospitals) when hospice is in the home for three months or longer.
Research also suggests that three weeks is the minimum length of hospice care for patients and families to begin to experience the full benefit of emotional support and guidance. However, at any point that a person has gone home to live out an advanced disease, Progressive Home Health Agency and affiliated Hospice Partners should be there to help, even if that is a short time.
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