What is comfort care in a nursing home?

Six months or less prognosis on a person’s life span can be distressing. What more if it is an illness that is physically excruciating day-in, day out? While comfort care cannot rid of the disease, it is a solution to alleviate the pain that the patient is enduring. 

The whats and whys in comfort care 

In nursing homes, the patients mean elders or people with disabilities who need caregiving, even before they are diagnosed with end-stage disease. When they receive comfort care, then it is a different or level approach to care.

Comfort care is similar to hospice and palliative caregiving. These services are for those who are terminally ill. However, palliative care is still doable to administer alongside treatments for patients who have chances to get a cure. Nevertheless, comfort care is essential to make the remaining days of a patient as painless as possible. A group of professionals and individuals provide a holistic approach to achieve this goal. They consist of doctors, health aides, therapists, spiritual counselors, and volunteers. 

One of the main focuses of the comfort care team is to ease any physical discomfort. It leads to a sound nursing plan that applies to one’s particular disease. It may include addressing shortness of breath, bloating, sleeping problems, aching muscles, and more. Indeed, the medical team relieves the symptoms while providing any assistance to soothe their feelings. Comforting also means ceasing medications and treatments that do not involve relief to the elders. Moreover, it includes mental stimulation, so they better handle stress. 

Other challenges in this end-life journey are the strains because of low emotional and spiritual levels. For this reason, patients must be with health professionals to stimulate their emotions and be their attentive companions. On the other hand, spiritual counselors can guide patients and even their relatives to accept their situation. They are there to listen to their struggles, as well as to offer uplifting insights or wisdom. 

Options for comfort care 

When clients seek hospice care, it is also excellent they know options they can tap. If you are one of them, here are some of the things you need to know: 

You can find financial assistance from government and private institutions to receive comfort care. Medicare and Medicaid offer support for this, which is almost applicable to any seniors who are US citizens and residences. Perhaps, what is only to inquire is how much they can cover.  

Apart from employing public health insurance programs, clients may also tap their private insurance providers and non-government institutions to help at the expense of comfort care.

You can have comfort care at home. Nursing homes are the leading providers of comfort or hospice care, but an elder or patient can also enjoy this at their homes. Indeed, hospice care is doable to experience at home with the help of skilled in-home health aides like certified caregivers and nursing assistants. They can work with care recipients’ doctors and administer pain-relieving treatment, and more. 

In this manner, home care providers like Living Well Family Care can help you. It has an array of services that relate to hospice. It includes a type of caregiving assistance and nursing services. Therefore, clients have more options to receive comfort care that suits their needs.