https://covenanthealthcare.com/Uploads/Public/Documents/Workfiles/Foundation/2017_Confidentiality_Training.pdf
https://www.oercommons.org/courseware/lesson/15344/overview
https://www.uncmedicalcenter.org/app/files/public/f06a4b2d-f855-4db7-9409-4dee81a6d675/MedCtr-Volunteer-Services-Tests-Communicating-Patients-Caregivers.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XZUOEJhYcs
Infographic
podcast: Volunteers in Hospice
Volunteer Position Description
Volunteer Hospice Training
Overview
The Role of the Volunteer in Hospice Care.
The importance of volunteers to the program cannot be overstated. Without volunteers, we could not provide the kinds nor the scope of services that are so urgently needed to enhance the quality of lives of our patients and their families. In this service, volunteers will learn about the specific functions and responsibilities expected of the volunteer, including the importance of working as a member of the multidisciplinary team working with both the patient and the family.
Orientation to the Volunteer Role in Hospice
Review what is hospice.
Discuss historical evolution and philospy
Review the video and ask for thoughts.
Review infographic
To Begin your training as a hospice volunteer with Alliant Home Health, a company that provides medical care to patients in their homes throughout the Denver Metro Area, we will discuss the fundamentals of hospice.
Alliant Home Health provides a variety of health care services in the comfort of the patient's home. Alliant Home Health is dedicated to providing you exceptional medical care allowing you to live longer and safer at home.
Core Services include:
- Skilled Nursing
- Physical Therapy
- Occupational Therapy
- Speech Therapy
- Certified Nursing Assistant
- Medical Social Services
- Hospice
Alliant Home Health is proud to serve communities across the front range with offices in Lakewood and Fort Collins. We are different from other home health agencies in many ways:
- Our owners have over 45 years of combined health care experience in Colorado
- We are family owned
- We are clinician owned
- We are veteran owned
- As a local company, we are able to adapt to the needs of the communities we serve
What is Hospice?
While we all have heard of hospice, not many of us have a thorough understanding of how it is implemented to serve those in their last months of life.
“You matter because of who you are. You matter to the last moment of your life, and we will do all we can, not only to help you die peacefully but also to live until you die.”
--Dame Cicely Saunders, founder of the first modern hospice
What is Hospice?
Hospice recognizes death as a universal fact of life. Hospice provides support and care for patients in their last phases of a life-limiting illness. Recognizing that dying is a natural part of life, the focus of hospice is on the individual and the involved family rather than on the disease. Hospice is life-affirming and neither hastens or postpones death. Hospice serves the whole person, emotionally, physically, and spiritually. Through supportive, palliative care, and open communication, the patient and family learn to more fully appreciate the activities of daily living. In the last few months of life, to a goal of hospice is to assist with the development of a caring community that can provide comprehensive services to patients and families.
Care focuses on quality of life, maintaining dignity, and a sense of personal fulfillment to the dying by allowing choices, listening, and caring. To qualify for hospice, a patient must have a life-limiting illness, with a prognosis of 6 months or less if the disease takes its normal course. The patient must consent to accept services, and forgo other medical treatments for the terminal illness.
Volunteers serve as a part of an interdisciplinary team to care for patients who have entered Hospice Care. These teams include Physicians, Nurses, CNAs, Social Workers, Chaplains, and Volunteers. The volunteers’ role on the team is not optional. Volunteers are considered a vital component of the service. In fact, it is required that 5% of care is provided by a volunteer.
What Kind of Care is Included in Hospice?
- symptom control and management, also known as palliative care
- pain management
- stress management and mental health support
- spiritual support
- family support
Symptom management does not involve treatment of the illness directly, such as the use of chemotherapy to treat cancer. Instead, hospice care helps ease symptoms to ensure the person can live comfortably in their final days.
Hospice caregivers also provide support to the families. Hospice Teams provide 24/7 support.
Objectives of Hospice:
- To provide palliative and supportive care services on an inpatient and outpatient basis to the terminally ill patient and family.
- To promote physical, psychological, social, and spiritual wellbeing for the terminally ill and their families through the integration of all physician and ancillary services.
- To encourage the patient to be actively involved in decision-making regarding care.
- To provide the terminally ill and their families with care to allow the patient to remain at home as long as possible up to and including death if that is the patient's desire.
- To maintain patients as pain-free and alert as possible under the continuing supervision of their personal physician.
- To provide, on an inpatient basis, temporary or intermittent care to control symptoms or modify treatment and provide short-term care to relieve the family.
- To reduce the cost of dying for the terminally ill and family.
- To continue to support the family after the patient's death through visits, phone contacts, mailings and through community bereavement groups.
- To provide service, support, and education for physicians, staff, volunteers, laypeople and clergy who care for the terminally ill.
Volunteering in Hospice
Welcome to your journey to becoming a Hospice Volunteer. Hospice Volunteers are caring, committed, reliable emotionally mature. Supporting someone through the dying process is likely to heighten you own values and help you to focus on what matters most in life.
Some questions to ask yourself might be:
- Are you comfortable with the concept of death and dying?
- Are you okay being alone with someone who is dying?
- Can you manage the suffering, tears, emotions, and stress of the patients and families without making them your own?
- Can you set aside you own opinions to support the patient and family?
- Are you a good team player and able to follow protocol?
- Can you handle a patient or family being rude or displaying inappropriate behavior?
- Can you make a weekly 4 hour commitment and be reliable?
In this role as a volunteer, you will
- Serve others
- Develop your ability to relate well to others, and learn other new skilss
- Grow personally
- Give back to your community
- Meet new people
- Have a direct, personal impact in the world
- Participate as a team
For the position description of the role of the volunteer and required training, please see the attached document.
As a volunteer for Alliant Home Hospice, you will work as part of an interdisciplinary team. Members of the team include physician, nurse, social worker, chaplain, volunteer, therapist, dietician. As a member of the team, it is critical that you communicate often. Because volunteers are so important to the team, it is mandated that 5% of the service provided to the patient and family must be performed by a volunteer. Of all of the team members, the volunteer is considered the most important in terms of all-around benefit to the patient. You will have the opportunity to provide physical, emotional, and spiritual support and save money for your hospice by providing care on a volunteer basis.
Some of the services that are offered by our agency include:
- 24 hours consultation with nursing staff, as needed,
- state of the art pain and symptom management
- emotional support and counseling
- spiritual support
- bereavement support
- medications needed for pain and symptom management
- equipment needed for comfort
- assistance with physical care
- therapies as needed
- volunteers as support.
When a person decides to become a Hospice patient, this individual and the family are asked if they would like volunteer services. Some do and some don't. The Volunteer Coordinator will be attending interdisciplinary team meetings and to determine which hospice families would like a volunteer and what their needs may be. For members of the team and their roles, please see the attached Interdisciplinary Team Members and their roles.
Before you are assigned a position, you will be provided with a description of the patient and family's situation. You are not required to accept a position. In fact, we want to make sure that the match is a good one for everyone involved. Because we were the entire Denver Metro area, we will ensure to find you a position within a 30 minutes drive from your home.
The Role of the Volunteer
What will I be doing?
Confidentiality
Give the confidentiality powerpoint. Ask the following questions:
What are some ways to avoiding seeing/hearing confidential information?
What are topics to avoid?
Maintaining Confidentiality is of upmost importance. In fact it is the law. https://silo.tips/download/hipaa-training-for-hospice-staff-and-volunteers
Communication Skills
xxx