This article was published
today in the News-Press, written by Jennifer Gordon. I wanted to share it
because Hospice is a wonderful service to families needing skilled nursing care. One of the many great things about Hospice is that it is 100% funded through
Medicare and you can use it in conjunction with our in-home care services.
If you have any questions regarding these types of services, do not hesitate to call us. We are here to help. 816-671-0298
Jessica Stewart | St. Joseph
News-Press
John Adams, center, is a patient at
Heartland Health Hands of Hope Hospice. His case manager is Delores Ferguson,
left, and his social worker is Judy Richmond.
The hospice panel
Sally Schwab, team leader
Kari Maag, volunteer coordinator
Jim Pierce, hospice resource specialist.
Judy Richmond, social worker
Shelli Ellison, nursing assistant.
Jason Atkinson, RN, case manager
Dave Ernst, chaplain
Dr. Chuck Mullican,
medical director
By Jennifer Gordon
St. Joseph News-Press
Hospice workers deal with the part of life
most of us want to avoid: the end. They help with grief and loss and all of the
issues that go along with it.
The News-Press recently sat down with a group
from Heartland Health Hands of Hope Hospice to discuss the career and the
surprising upsides of the job.
The conversation has been edited for
length and clarity.
Why did you go into
hospice work?
Jim Pierce, hospice
resource specialist: My first career was as a pastor for a
church. I had experience comforting families. ... It was my own sense of
wanting to do more that lead me to hospice.
Dave Ernst, chaplain: I was a pastor also for a number of years and I wanted to acquire
some more pastoral skills. ...The opportunity to be a hospital chaplain came
up. ... After I got into that, I found that so many skills needed to be a
hospital chaplain meshed with hospice: compassion, intuition, the ability to be
present with people.
Judy Richmond, social
worker: I had done outpatient counseling and
came to be a bereavement counselor. I tend to enjoy offering compassion to
people, and I started a grief support program for kids in the community.
Shelli Ellison,
nursing assistant: I’ve been a nursing assistant in
hospice for 17 years. I worked at the Hope House, and when it closed, I came to
the field.
Jason Atkinson, RN
case manager: I think hospice for me was kind of a
calling. When I worked at the hospital and patients were in the dying process,
I knew I did that work pretty well and I felt confident. ... It’s still a
passion for me.
Dr. Chuck Mullican,
medical director: I think it’s a natural evolution of an
internist to engage in a deeper appreciation of what it means to take care of
people at the end of their lives.
Kari Maag, volunteer
coordinator: It’s a blessing to be a blessing to
those we serve.
Sally Schwab, team
leader: What I will tell you about hospice is
that it chose me. I didn’t choose it. It chose me from a personal life story
because I went through the loss of both of my parents prior to my first time of
leadership in hospice.
Describe your role in
hospice.
Ellison: ... we get to be the little entertainer. We get to play music for
them, make them comfortable, paint their fingernails and do their hair.
Atkinson: It’s a very challenging job, not so much with the skills that I
have in the hospital as far as doing I.V.s and drawing blood, but it’s just
more of a challenge working with the team to make the patient comfortable.
Maag: We, like other specialties, have an agenda. Our agenda is to bring
happiness to the patient. We leave that open ended to where the patients can
guide the visits more.
Schwab: What I know about hospice is that the people called to do hospice
work. ... They need support and care to do that work. That is what I believe my
primary role is other than managerial oversight.
Richmond: People are feeling very inadequate at the time they’ve gotten a
terminal illness. They’ve just gotten repeated bad news after bad news, a lot
of times about their health. What we try to do is remind them about the good in
their life, their valuable character qualities, their past successes, their
careers.
Schwab: There’s a discomfort with people in general with what to say and
how to be with people who are dying. The hospice team does it very differently.
They stay. They sit. They talk. They touch.
Ernst: I would agree that so many families are locked into grief or their
in-the-moment needs that their patient is experiencing, and part of our role is
to reframe their lives. We help them celebrate and remember the legacy that
their loved ones had.
Mullican: We add life to their days, not days to their life.
Schwab: It’s whole-person care. It’s what the future of health care wants
to be, and it exists now.
How does the job
affect you?
Richmond: It’s more real to us than the general population that everybody is
going to die. ... It gives us an opportunity to realize how beneficial it is to
be supportive and loving to everyone on our team.
Mullican: It buoys you up a little bit. I’m impressed with the resilience of
patients and their families.
Pierce: Part of that is the gifts that all these patients and families
give. What they teach, not only about dying but also about living.
Richmond: It’s one of those jobs that once you’ve done it, it’s like why ...
don’t you do something less stressful? But then once you know how to do it, you
feel somewhat like, Well, I do know how to do this and I’m willing to do it,
and many people are not willing to do it, so....
Atkinson: You hear it from your own family, ‘How can you do this job?’ ...
Sometimes you wonder how long you can do it.
Pierce: I think all of us in this particular work learn about being human,
about being in family and about being community in ways we might not learn
otherwise.
Schwab: We’re all kind of a collage of the people who have impacted us.
What are some
misconceptions around hospice care?
Pierce: You used the term ‘care for people in their least-healthy time of
life’ and from a physical perspective, that’s true, but a lot of the folks this
group cares for are very healthy in a lot of ways — emotionally, relationally
with their families, spiritually.
Schwab: I think it’s important to say in an article like this that when a
person becomes a hospice patient, they have not given up. They have chosen to
be cared for in a way that supports them and their family members as they deal
with end-of-life concerns and issues.
Pierce: I think there’s another misconception that it’s unbelievably sad.
That’s just not true at all. There’s a lot of joy in interacting with these
families and a lot of shared laughter and stories and humor. It’s one of the
gifts we see every time we go into somebody’s home.
Jennifer Gordon can be reached at jennifer.gordon@newspressnow.com.
Follow her on Twitter: @jjgordon.
