End-of-Life Care Services in Orange County and Greater Los Angeles

Caregiving in the Final Stages
In the final stages of many life-limiting illnesses, care priorities tend to shift. Instead of ongoing healing measures, the focus often changes to comfort care - for the relief of pain, symptoms, and emotional stress. Ensuring a loved one's final months, weeks, or days are as good as they can be requires more than just a series of care choices. Anticipating the demands of end-of-life caregiving can help ease the journey from care and grief towards acceptance and healing.
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Understanding Late Stages of Care
In the late stages of a life-limiting illness, it becomes evident that in spite of the best care possible, your loved one is approaching the end of his or her life. It is at this time that the focus of care changes from one of healing and rehabilitation, to one of peace and comfort. Depending on the nature of the illness and the patient’s circumstances, this final stage period may last from a matter of days, to weeks, or months, or sometimes even several years. During this time, a licensed hospice care provider is essential to providing proper hospice care measures – those designed to soothe and comfort a client - can provide options such as medications to control pain and other symptoms, such as constipation, nausea, or shortness of breath.

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Families often find the last stages of the life of their loved one uniquely challenging. Simple acts of daily care that had been easy and routine before, are then combined with complex end-of-life decisions – causing pain and feelings of bereavement. In addition to home health aides and hospice nurses, physicians and nursing home personnel, end-of-life caregiving requires support. Support for the family and friends who surround and comfort their loves ones on a daily basis. Newport Home Care provides that support in the form of both support to a licensed hospice provider, and respite care for the family caregiver.

Patient and Caregiver Needs in Late Stage Care
It is important for the physical and mental health of both the patient and the caregiver, that the needs of both are identified and respected. Deciding what type of care is practical as conditions worsen, must be balanced with respecting the comfort and dignity needs of a client whose health is rapidly diminishing. Family caregivers have needs as well. Respite care is an important part of end of life services. We call this “care for the caregiver”. Grief support is also essential to the mental wellbeing of a family caregiver.

• Practical care and assistance. Perhaps your loved one can no longer talk, sit, walk, eat, or make sense of the world. Routine activities, including bathing, feeding, toileting, dressing, and repositioning may require total support and increased physical strength on the part of the caregiver. These tasks can be performed by Newport Home Care’s personal care assistants.
• Comfort and dignity. Even if the patient’s cognitive and memory functions are depleted, their capacity to feel frightened or at peace, loved or lonely, and sad or insecure remains. Regardless of location—home, hospital, hospice facility—the most helpful interventions are those which ease discomfort and provide meaningful connections to family and loved ones.
• Respite Care. Respite care can give you and your family a break from the intensity of end-of-life caregiving. It may be simply a case of having a caregiver sit with the patient at home for a few hours so you can meet friends for coffee or watch a movie, or it could involve a caregiver visit to a facility to relieve a family member.
• Grief support. Anticipating your loved one’s death can produce reactions from relief to sadness to feeling numb. Consulting bereavement specialists or spiritual advisors before your loved one’s death can help you and your family prepare for the coming loss.

You Are Not Alone
A terminally ill patient’s deteriorating medical condition, increased physical safety needs, and the 24-hour demands of final-stage care often mean the primary caregiver will need additional in-home help. In many cases, patients prefer to remain at home in the final stages of life, in comfortable surroundings with family and loved ones nearby.
While every patient and each family’s needs are different, multiple changes can be difficult for a terminally ill patient, especially one with advanced Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of dementia. It’s easier for a patient to stay at home before they’re at the end stage of their illness. In these situations, planning ahead is important.
Newport Home Care’s End of Life services were designed with both the patient and family in mind. Our Respite care services, designed with the family caregiver in mind, focus on providing relief to a family caregiver that may need time away. Our patient focused end of life care - preserving the comfort and dignity of our client amidst rapidly diminishing conditions - remains our priority.

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