What a Hospice Service Provides and Your Ever-Challenging Role as a Hospice CNA

 
Providing Comfort and Care to Terminal Patients

Working in hospice care can be a rewarding yet challenging position, and it takes a exceptional kind of person to succeed within this workforce. However, for those who do, they know that they are truly an integral part of something special. Hospice is primarily designed to serve people that are nearing the end of their life, whether through old age, terminal illness, or a chronic condition. Naturally, these patients will have special needs, and hospice care is designed to help enhance these individuals remaining time through support, pain management, and other services. As a hospice worker with CNA certification, you will be an important part of each patient’s hospice experience, and possibly one of the most involved participants. After all, it is the CNA who regularly attends to patient’s grooming, feeding, and other essential duties for those under hospice care.

Choosing a Work Setting: Personal Homes or Care Facilities

The primary focus of hospice is to focus on keeping patients as contented as possible, which is why services will be available in a patient’s home, an assisting living facility, nursing home, or hospital. Patients with families will often choose to remain in their home, while others will choose a facility to not be a burden on their loved ones. Realistically, an overseeing physician for each patient’s case will ultimately make a recommendation, but the final choice is typically left up to the patient or his or her guardian.

Many hospice care providers will offer their nurses and nurse aides the opportunity to choose whether they prefer to work within the primary care establishment or in a patient’s home. Naturally, your access to reliable transportation and possessing a good driving record will be essential to work in the home setting. Depending on the size of your city and the span of the hospice care’s servicing area, expect to do a good bit of driving if you choose to work in private homes. As a CNA, expect the working conditions to vary between providing care for patients at home vs. facility care, so see our in-depth article discussing the differences.

Working with Hospice Staff to Foster Patient Comfort

A dedicated team of caregivers is assigned to handle each hospice care patient’s case. There will be a primary medical physician, and typically, a team of two on-call nurses that will be your contacts in case of emergency, and they are whom you will report patient’s changes in status to when necessary. You will be required to work closely with these medical providers to ensure that the patient is properly medicated and being properly cared for by family members if they are receiving home care. A social worker and chaplain is often assigned to help families and patients deal with the inevitable passage of life, so be prepared to process requests and information provided to you by them, as well.

However, there will often be several different people with CNA certification assisting to a particular patient’s needs. You may only see a certain patient once during the course of their time under the care of hospice, or you might be assigned to regularly care for them. Every situation is different, and your scheduling will be highly dependent upon your choice of work settings. Because of the constant shift in nurses aides, keeping good notes is essential to performing your work duties. Documenting the procedures you perform, the medications the patient is taking, and their personal and physical demeanor is important to keep all of these staff members on the same page, so to speak. You will find that you heavily rely on the notes of previous staff to keep you informed, and the benefits of keeping paperwork current are obvious.

Is Becoming a Hospice CNA Right for You?

Naturally, in this position, you will be performing the duties you learned in your CNA training classes, but hospice care often serves up a few additional challenges. For this reason, many states and certain facilities prefer to hire nurse aides that have undergone specific enhancement training for hospice care. Working as a hospice CNA is ideal for those with a good deal of compassion for the well-being of others, and it certainly takes a lot of patience, especially when dealing with those very close to death. Emotionally, this work can be trying, as you must understand that inevitably, your patients will pass away. It is not uncommon for nurse aides to become emotionally attached to their patients, and you need to be prepared to cope with grief yourself as you help patients and families do the same. Those up for the challenges of hospice will find themselves the recipient of personal rewards, as well as a higher CNA salary.

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