Medical Social Services and Spiritual Services

Embrace Hospice provides counseling and support for our patients and their families. We help through the emotional, financial, and spiritual process.

Medical Social Services

Embrace Hospice has a professional care team that provides the Medical, Spiritual, and Bereavement counseling needed for the patient and their family. We assist you with many of the tasks that seem difficult during this time. We help the patient and family in coming to terms with dying. We assist with tasks to make end of life treatment less complicated.

It is certainly a delicate and difficult period for a family to deal with a terminal illness. We assist with organization, coordination, and implementation of necessary paperwork, as well as daily medical coordination, including the Medicare Hospice Benefit and private insurance forms. Our Medical Social Worker provides emotional support to the patient, family and staff, and provides ongoing education and assistance. The Medical Social Worker will make an initial visit to a new hospice patient within 5 days of admission and will continue to make visits on a monthly basis.

The Medical Social Worker will discuss and assist with:

Advanced Directives including Living Wills, Power of Attorney (POA), and Do-Not-Resuscitate (DNR) orders:

- A Living Will provides written instructions about the type of care they would like to receive in the event they become unconscious or are unable to make decisions.
- A Medical Power of Attorney provides written instructions assigning someone to be in charge of making important decisions on behalf if they become incapable of making those decisions on their own. This is also known as assigning a healthcare agent.
- A Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care allows you to appoint a person or persons to make health care decisions if you cannot act for yourself. A Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care is broader because it can apply to any condition you may have or treatment you may need.
- The Out-of-Hospital Do-Not-Resuscitate Order allows patients to direct health care professionals in the out-of-hospital setting to withhold or withdraw specific life-sustaining treatments in the event of respiratory or cardiac arrest under hospice care. The Out-of-Hospital Do-Not-Resuscitate program allows people to decide that they do not want to be resuscitated. The program allows people to declare that certain resuscitative measures will not be used on them. Those resuscitative measures specifically listed in the OOH DNR legislation are cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), advanced airway management, defibrillation, artificial ventilations and transcutaneous cardiac pacing.

Determining care options, including respite care, handling coordination with the family and care facility
Coordinate placement into a personal care home or nursing facility if higher levels of care are needed
Serves as intermediary between hospice clinical team and bereavement staff
Provide information and support to determine what is right for the patient. The Medical Social Worker puts the family in touch with private duty care, Agency on Aging services, funeral homes and services, VA benefits, and help with determining insurance/financial assistance.

Spiritual Services

Embrace Hospice offers pastoral and bereavement care for both routine and emergency purposes. The Pastoral Care team at Embrace Hospice is comprised of ordained ministers with various religious affiliations. In keeping with the Hospice philosophy, the goal of the Pastoral Care team is to provide an interfaith forum where spiritual needs of the individual come first, not the denomination. Patients and their families will be relieved knowing Embrace Hospice provides spiritual services during their entire journey.

This spiritual support team can also assist with funeral arrangements and conducting memorial services.

Consistent with all hospice concepts, spiritual care should give the patient the opportunity to assess and self-evaluate within a defined spiritual perspective; to investigate beliefs, not just take them for granted. Some of the spiritual needs we look for are:

Re-examining beliefs

Exploring beliefs of an afterlife

Reconciling life choices

Exploring one’s contributions and achievements

Examining loving relationships

Discovering meaning

The need for fellowship and spiritual conversation

Prayer and meditation

Religious rituals, such as communion, confession scripture.

The Hospice Chaplain is there to meet the spiritual needs of all hospice patients whatever their faith or belief stance. All persons have spiritual concerns when facing death. The hospice chaplain may assist hospice patients explore their belief stance, personalize it and use it creatively to cope with living and dying.

About Our Ministers

Available to provide a listening ear when you are worried, afraid, or just need to talk
Address spiritual concerns you may have
Will join you in prayer, read scripture, or just sit quietly
Provide or arrange for religious sacraments or other religious rites
Conduct funeral and/or memorial services

Pastoral Care

As a discipline, pastoral care is available to help families as they struggle with questions or feelings that are asked during a life-threatening illness:

Why me?
Why do good people suffer?
How do I find spiritual peace?
What are my beliefs and feelings about illness and death?
How do I understand the successes and failures of my life?
How do I deal with regrets?
What do I need to say to the people I love?

If you have a spiritual affiliation, with your permission, we can contact your minister to invite them to communicate with our hospice interdisciplinary team so we can best serve your needs in coordination.

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