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The mission of Kauai Hospice is to ensure the highest quality of life possible for individuals and their families facing a life-threatening illness; to provide bereavement support to individuals, and to promote an understanding of Hospice services.

Description:
Kaua'i Hospice services include but are not limited to physician's consultation; nursing care; dietary counseling; medical supplies and equipment; medication for management of pain and other symptoms; short-term hospitalization care; assistance with bathing and activities of daily living; chore service for meal preparation and light housekeeping; physical, occupational and speech therapy; spiritual, emotional and social counseling; grief support; information regarding living wills, power of attorney and funeral arrangements; and general community grief and bereavement counseling, support and education. Care is provided free of charge to the patient and is available 24 hours per day.

Hospice services are available to patients of any age, religion, race, or illness.
Typically, a family member serves as the primary caregiver and, when appropriate, helps make decisions for the terminally ill individual. Members of the hospice staff make regular visits to assess the patient and provide additional care or other services. The hospice team develops a care plan that meets each patient's individual needs for pain management and symptom control.

Kaua'i Hospice provides its services to individuals on Kaua`i who are diagnosed with life-threatening illness with a prognosis of six months or less. The philosophy of Hospice is that the quality of one's life is not determined by the quantity of time remaining to live. Hospice provides support and coordinates care for persons facing life-threatening illnesses and shortened life expectancy so that they might live as fully and comfortably as possible. Hospice neither hastens nor postpones death. Hospice affirms life and views death as a natural process, an experience that unites us all. The aim is to provide support and comfort when focus shifts from curing the illness to providing comforting care for the person and his or her family in the home.

Kaua'i Hospice services provide support and hospice care through a combination of in-home nursing and an extensive network of support services. The focus is on controlling pain, managing symptoms, providing comfort, dignity and quality of life when the quantity of life may be limited. Hospice deals with the physical, emotional, social, and spiritual impact of the disease on the patient, the patient's family and significant others.

Services are offered by an interdisciplinary team. The patient and the family, as members of the team, are at the center of all decision-making. Professional services include nursing care, home health aide care, nutritional guidance, social work assistance, family counseling, spiritual support and bereavement care. Because round-the-clock, hands-on care is the hallmark of the hospice experience, hospice provides trained volunteers to aid the family and patients. Most hospice volunteers are trained to relieve the primary caregivers, do household chores, and help bathe the patients. Perhaps the most important task, however, is their ability to be good listeners.

All of the care provided to the hospice patient is approved and directed by the patient's personal physician together with the Kauai Hospice Medical Director.

Hospice Care
Through its Hospice Care Program, Kaua`i Hospice strives to ensure the highest quality of life possible for individuals and their families in their own home. Support is offered through a personalized plan of care to ease the many different types of pain facing patients and families during such a difficult period of time. The Hospice Team: medical director, registered nurses, social worker, spiritual counselor, trained volunteers, home health aide and bereavement care coordinator assists patients to live their lives comfortably without pain, managing the symptoms of the illness.

Volunteer Training and Support
Volunteers are vital to every part of Kaua`i Hospice's programs. Services provided include patient and family care, bereavement support, office work, public education and fundraising. The nature of Hospice care requires a very special kind of volunteer; so all volunteers are screened and trained before they begin working with families. A 32-hour training is offered annually; through lectures, film presentations and guest speakers, volunteers become familiar with the different stages of death and dying and learn about Bereavement Care.

Community & Professional Education
Kaua`i Hospice actively represents the point of view that death is a natural part of life. Kaua'i Hospice reaches out to the community at large as well as the professional community to offer information and education regarding care at the end of life. We serve as a resource on issues related to death, dying, grief and bereavement by sponsoring educational workshops, coordinating volunteer in-service training, attending health fairs and speaking to community and professional organizations. Kaua`i Hospice works with other human service agencies to provide knowledge and comfort to those in our community facing challenging times.

Bereavement Care
Kaua`i Hospice's Bereavement Services are a fully integrated part of a full continuum of Hospice services, available without charge to the patient/family.

The Bereavement Care Program is unique, having developed through servicing Kaua'i's diverse families and communities over the years. The program has grown to meet the individual needs of the members of a family affected by the patient's death and now extends to the broader community. Bereavement support is offered to all family members for a minimum of 12 months after the death of their loved one.

Education and support are the keystones of the Bereavement Care Program. It is often difficult for the family and friends who have recently experienced the death of a loved one to understand why the grieving process lasts so long. It is important, therefore, to be counseled about the stages of grieving, and to understand that the process may take as long as five years.

Bereavement service begins when a client first experiences the trauma of loss. After the death, one of the first emotional reactions is to shut down, or go numb. This acts to cushion emotions during early stages of overwhelming grief. Even an expected death is a shock. No one can know how a particular loss is going to feel until the loss actually occurs.

As the numbness wears off, the bereaved begin to realize what the loss is going to truly mean. This explains why many bereaved persons may feel worse months after a loss. Mourners begin some of their hardest grieving at a point when support received immediately after the death has decreased.

The Bereavement Care Program is open to anyone grieving the death of a loved one no matter when or where the death occurred. Grief is a very individual process that is greatly influenced by culture and community background. Because of these differences, Kaua'i Hospice provides many kinds of support, including one-to-one support and bereavement care groups.

Forget Me Not is a program for grieving children and teens that offers age-appropriate support. Programs are delivered in response to referrals from schools and the community. Groups have ranged in age from elementary school to high school and are often a collaborative effort with schools, concerned teachers or counselors and agencies such as Queen Liliuokalani Children's Center. Kaua'i Hospice also responds to requests from schools for bereavement support to families, classmates, teachers and administrators when suicides, accidents and other unexpected deaths occur.

In addition to these core bereavement services, when individuals and families experience a sudden or accidental death on Kaua`i, the Bereavement Care Program offers Emergency Bereavement Support, also known as The Beeper Team. Help is available on an on-call basis, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Calls to this special team of staff and volunteers come from hospital emergency rooms as well as Police and Fire Departments. Volunteers are trained to meet special needs of families in crisis by assisting with practical tasks, telephoning family and friends, handling mortuary arrangements, making airline reservations, as well as providing emotional support and helping to address the deep grief that arises from such tragic events.

Kaua`i Hospice's Bereavement Services are coordinated by the Bereavement Care Coordinator with support from the Medical Social Worker and Spiritual Care Coordinator. Due to the intense nature of the role, volunteers are hand picked from a pool graduated from both Hospice Volunteer and Bereavement training. Each volunteer receives minimally 36-hours of training. At present, more than 80 trained and active volunteers work in Kaua'i Hospice bereavement programs.

History:
Kaua'i Hospice, Inc., a non-profit tax-exempt charitable organization, was formally established in June,1983, in the state of Hawaii. At that time, the grassroots organization was operated purely by part-time volunteers. Since then, the 501(c)(3) has developed into a professionally staffed, Medicare and Medicaid certified organization with a supportive cadre of about 80 specially trained program volunteers and hundreds of general community volunteers. Kaua'i Hospice is the only hospice on the Garden Island.

Contact person: Liana Soong, Development & Community Liaison, (phone), (email)

Address:

P.O. Box 3286 Lihue, HI 96766

Web Site: http://www.kauaihospice.org