Home-hospice partnership positions West Lake to enhance quality of palliative care

Partnership will strive to provide residents ‘with the best service and the best care that we can while they’re in our home’

Janie Denard says the partnership West Lake Terrace and Hospice Prince Edward are in the first phase of creating to help enhance seamless palliative care in the region will enhance quality end-of-life care for residents.

Janie, the Picton-area long-term care home’s life enrichment co-ordinator, says an important part of West Lake’s vision of the partnership will be that residents who are palliative and do not have family members to support them will have a group of volunteers the home can call for support.

“(The partnership) is about the residents and providing them with the best service and the best care that we can while they’re in our home, whether it comes from our own staff or from volunteers from the community,” Janie says.

The partnership will also increase the number of West Lake team members trained in palliative care and end-of-life care. The training will be provided by the hospice team.

“(Palliative and end-of-life care) are not things that people are always willing to talk about, so it’s just … changing the environment so that we are comfortable having these conversations with the residents and with our own families,” Janie says.

Janie, who has taken several palliative care courses, says end-of-life care is an area that can always be improved upon. Making the journey more seamless for residents and their families is one such area.

And the timing for this partnership is right, she adds. Janie notes that people are moving into long-term care homes later in life with more care needs.

“We’re doing a better job of keeping people healthy in the community, so some of our residents are coming to us very much palliative and they might even be at the end stage of their life, so I think this is really something we need to focus our time and our efforts on,” she says.

“I think our partnership with Hospice Prince Edward is just going to make this position a lot easier for the staff, as we embrace the education and the change of culture in the home – I think this is going to make a big difference.”

– This is Part 2 of a two-part story. You can click here to read Part 1.

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