What are the Hospice Levels of Care?

Routine Home Care

 Mission Hospice provides hospice care to patients in homes, long-term care facilities such as nursing homes, assisted living facilities and residential care facilities for the elderly.  Routine care is Mission Hospice’s standard level of care, which patients will receive care that has been scheduled in the care plan designed by the Mission Hospice staff and patient’s family to have the patient as comfortable as possible towards the end of their life expectancy.

If a medical crisis occurs, and symptoms need a higher level of care at Mission Hospice; team members working with conjunction with the patient and their family, may increase the care to numerous options to manage the crisis.

Continuous Care

One of the options available at Mission Hospice is Continuous Care, where one of our nurses would provide a minimum of eight hours of care in a day to manage the symptoms depending on if the patient meets the criteria assess by the RN Case Manager; so that the patient may stay in their setting rather than being transferred to an emergency room. Continuous Care may be provided in any setting except an acute care facility. Some of the symptoms that are exhibited that qualify as patient to be on continuous care are uncontrolled pain, severe respiratory distress, seizures, and other distressing symptoms.

General Inpatient Care

One of the options available at Mission Hospice is Continuous Care, where one of our nurses would provide a minimum of eight hours of care in a day to manage the symptoms depending on if the patient meets the criteria assess by the RN Case Manager; so that the patient may stay in their setting rather than being transferred to an emergency room. Continuous Care may be provided in any setting except an acute care facility. Some of the symptoms that are exhibited that qualify as patient to be on continuous care are uncontrolled pain, severe respiratory distress, seizures, and other distressing symptoms.

Respite Care

Family taking care of a patient at home is common with many hospice situations.  Mission Hospice staff is mindful and respect the need for family members take it upon themselves to care for their terminally ill relatives.  At Mission Hospice, we provide respite care where we give short-term impatient care for the patient while the family can take some time to rest.

Respite care may be provided in a home or nursing facility to allow family members to leave the care giving area whenever it may be necessary.

This benefit is limited to 5 consecutive days at a time and provides a brief “respite” for the patient’s primary caregiver by admitting the home care patient to a long term care facility for that time period.