The hospice care facility can provide many services to many different kinds of people. Hospice care facilities have become commonplace throughout the country, providing hospice resources to those who can no longer live on their own – and whose families are not able to take care of them. After all, most families simply will not have the hospice resources that can be provided at the typical hospice care facility, be it a holistic hospice care facility or otherwise.
For one thing, a hospice care facility and most hospice services can provide monitoring around the clock, meaning that patients are actively being kept safe as many as 24 hours out of the day. In the typical home environment where hospice care is not present, such a thing is not particularly possible in any way, especially if the family caretakers must also work in order to survive (as is very much the case for the majority of all adults living in the United States). Hospice care facility workers can also improve overall quality of life for patients, as the hospice patients are their number one priority, something that is unfortunately also not possible in the typical home setting due to reasons mentioned above as well as the stresses of life and the lack of hospice resources, which is also mentioned above.
But who might attend a hospice care facility? Who does moving into a hospice care facility benefit? In many cases, elderly people make up the majority of the population at any given hospice care facility (as a matter of fact, only just over 5% of all hospice care recipients are still under the age of 65, the threshold for being considered elderly). Elderly people are simply in need of more support in terms of day to day living than people who are not elderly, and moving to a hospice care facility can provide this support. Up to 15% of this elderly population is also struggling with a number of different mental illnesses, something that the typical hospice care facility is also likely to be able to deal with. And when a person begins to need more and more aid in life, keeping them at home can become difficult and, all too frequently, even dangerous. For patients with dementia and other health issues, a hospice care facility can be, by and large, the best and safety place for them to live.
And the number of elderly people in this country is growing, thanks to the aging Baby Boomer generation. As a matter of fact, at least one fifth of the total American population will be able to be considered elderly all by the time that we reach the year of 2030, which is now just ten years in our future. And while many of these elderly people will be able to be self sufficient for quite some time into the future at this point, many others can benefit from the hospice services provided at the typical hospice care facility. After all, the number of people receiving hospice care is also on the rise. Back in the year of 2000, now two decades in our past, hospice care rates were still relatively low, with only around half of a million (only just over half of a million, to be just a bit more exact) people receiving hospice care of any kind. By the time that we reached the year of 2015, however, very nearly one and a half million people had become recipients of hospice care, often in the setting of a hospice care facility. In the half of a decade that has transpired since, the number of people that receive hospice care services both in home and from hospice care facilities has continued to climb ever upward.
At the end of the day, it can be difficult to admit the need for hospice care services. However, admitting this need and receiving the hospice care services that one needs can greatly improve overall quality of life, of this there is just no doubt. For many people living all throughout the United States, the importance of hospice care is pivotal in their lives and is not something that should be underestimated.
