What Does Comfort Care Mean In The Hospital
The goal is to give the patient autonomy access to information and choice.
What does comfort care mean in the hospital. Examples of comfort care measures. The term comfort care is used here to describe a set of the most basic palliative care interventions that provide immediate relief of symptoms in a patient who is very close to death. Comfort care is a form of medical care that focuses on relieving symptoms and optimizing comfort as patients undergo the dying process.
Knowing whether the patient is imminently dying can also inform many personal decisions for family caregivers such as whether a wife wants to stay overnight in the hospital and whether a son still has time to fly in to see his father. You are probably reading this because someone close to you is dying. Comfort care is a euphemism a term very commonly used between clinicians and between clinicians and families to mean end of life care.
Comfort care is a form of medical care not an abandoning of it i think that using the term comfort care is a bit of a misnomer says dr. When doctors are talking to patients about transitioning away from life prolonging or curative therapies they often discuss the alternative as comfort focused therapies thus the term comfort care. Keep in mind that comfort care can be provided in a hospital nursing home or private home.
What is comfort care. When a patient has entered the final days of life it makes sense to stop daily blood work and potentially futile medications and to focus on comfort care. All three terms refer to care received by patients and their families to improve quality of life by meeting physical emotional and spiritual needs.
Comfort care as palliative care addresses physical intellectual emotional social and spiritual needs. The goals are to prevent or relieve suffering as much as possible and to improve quality of life while respecting the dying person s wishes. If she is going home or back to a care facility they should definitely put her on hospice.
When a patient can no longer benefit from curative treatment comfort care can allow a better quality of life at the end of life. It is care that helps or soothes a person who is dying. If for some reason she starts to get better she can always stop hospice.