Health care providers are invaluable team members in the care of Community Hospice & Palliative Care patients. As trusted advisers, you’re often the first to discuss advanced care options or advance care planning with your patients and their loved ones. When they have questions and you need answers, we’re here for you with the information, education and professional guidance you expect from your partner in caring.
For patients in your care who live with advanced illness, you can still offer hope for a better quality of life when you partner with Community Hospice & Palliative Care to give them the high-quality, supportive care they deserve.
We recognize the longstanding relationships many providers have with their patients, relationships that can span decades. We value those strong ties and strive to involve you in your patients’ ongoing care, however you wish to remain involved.
Our care teams offer you updates based on your preferences, coordinate care with specialist and consulting providers, and respond to patient situations around the clock, offering you greater peace of mind.
Patients are eligible for hospice care when they have an advanced illness and life expectancy of 12 months or less, as determined by a physician. They also must desire hospice care, which stresses comfort and pain management over disease-modifying therapies.
If you are unsure about life expectancy, our physicians are available for consults anytime. For patients and loved ones, we offer no-obligation information visits to help them understand their choices.
There’s a myth that hospice care is only for people with cancer. The fact is Community Hospice & Palliative Care serves patients with a variety of advanced, end-stage conditions. These include, but are not limited to, cancer, cardiopulmonary disease, end-stage renal failure, end-stage liver disease, neurological conditions, end-stage HIV and malnutrition.
After you approve Community Hospice & Palliative Care and the patient and family consent to our services, we work with all parties to customize the plan of care. We ask you how — and how often — you want updates. And we give you choices about your role in ongoing care — by maintaining total care, allowing us to manage pain and symptoms, or consenting for us to manage total care. To us, your decision is never final.
A representative from our Health Care Relations team can come to your office or facility with information for you or your patients. He or she also can work with your team to set up an in-service for larger groups. We offer more than 75 topics related to advanced illness, communication skills, admission criteria, ethics, spirituality and many more, with some programs as brief as 20 minutes. Call 904.407.5113 to get started.
Along with traditional hospice care, we offer Community Palliative Care, a hospital-based consultative service at several area facilities. Palliative care offers some of the benefits of hospice care, but it’s available at any stage of any life-limiting illness, and patients can receive it while pursuing disease-modifying therapies with a curative intent. We also provide advance care planning services at no cost through our Honoring Choices® Florida community collaborative.
We partner with nursing homes and assisted living communities to provide compassionate care to residents. There we offer an added layer of support, including care planning assistance, help with Medicaid applications and pre-screening, in-services for staff, memorial services, emotional support for family members and specialized programs such as wound care, crisis intervention care and pet therapy. We’re there when you need us, including nights, weekends and holidays.
Along with hospice care, we support patients and families throughout the continuum of care with services that meet them where they are.
The Caregiver Coalition of Northeast Florida, a program of Community Hospice & Palliative Care, is an alliance of area nonprofit organizations that supports strong family caregiving on the First Coast. The Coalition hosts conferences, publishes a quarterly newsletter and website. Best of all, its programs are free and open to all caregivers in any caring situation. Visit MyCaregiverConnection.org to learn more.
We know time is a limited resource in a clinical setting. Honoring Choices Florida®, a program of Community Hospice & Palliative Care, offers tools to help guide you through advance care planning discussions with your patients. Our professionals can provide training to your clinical and office staff to become certified Honoring Choices Florida facilitators. This training will provide them with the education necessary to guide patients through the conversation and to document their health care wishes. Visit HonoringChoicesFL.com for more information.
Established in 2010, our hospital-based palliative consultative service, Community Palliative Care, helps relieve the pain, symptoms and stress of any serious illness. Our team also helps patients and families make important future care decisions and establish goals of care. Call 904.407.7700 for consult or education requests.
