Reid Hospital Hospice Services

Unfortunately, I’m in a position to review this.
In March 2011, my mum was diagnosed with Pancreatic Cancer. This came on the heels of an unrelated Bladder Cancer that had been completely removed. She started chemotherapy after some debate and thought.
The first two, differing treatments did not go well, but sparing you details, I had called her Internist and he set up an assessment visit with these people. Yvonne was extremely compassionate and tried to make things as smooth as possible.
In a week, she had gone from barely breathing and barely conscious to nearly her regular self. After a couple more weeks, we canceled hospice care. Jan, the assigned nurse, and Virginia, the aide came to visit, rather than stay with my mum.
There were several months where I provided care but the pain was increasing horribly.
Maybe, 5 weeks before she died, we re-​engaged hospice again. Mum had been experiencing horrific pain and the meds just weren’t enough. She would wake at 9:30 or 10 in the morning, the pain would start about 11, and with all the meds I could give her, she would be unconscious from 3 to 10 at night. When she woke, I helped her to bed, as she was generally too weak to walk.
Yvonne returned to do the assessment and Jan was assigned to be the visiting nurse. Several days into it, Jan asked if mum would like to go to hospital to better manage the pain and mum agreed to it.
I’m sad to say that things were not as good as they should have been. Hospice shares an area on the 5^th floor and they have possibly 6 beds. The admission and room assignment were done before we arrived, but the pain medication was nowhere to be found. It took nearly 3 hours for anything to be given.
For two days, they went through the same cycle that I did, which made me feel vindicated, but still unhappy. The nurses assigned to the hospice beds were not hospice nurses. Several of them were uncomfortable with the dosages prescribed and given. This changed, except for two LPNs, during the time of her stay.
Part way through the third day (the second full day) there, hospice nurse Marg showed up and took control, even though it was the end of her shift and she could have gone home. She changed things quite a bit and we argued about how to handle things and she actually listened to my input. She and Jan worked tirelessly. It was late when mum finally drifted off into unconsciousness.
In any case, it took a few more days to get 24 hour control of the pain and then, they had to convert the meds to something I could administer at the house. They got it figured out, we took mum home, and things returned to the other routine.
Sorry to go into so much detail but it’s difficult to explain otherwise. The group did fine when they banded together. When they acted as home health care nurses, I think it wasn’t so good. Perhaps, it was the cancer, the pain, and the meds, but it was much tougher for them to handle. They were helpful, but I’m not sure to what extent they could have been helpful.
One thing that struck me as amazing was that several of the hospice workers showed up at the funeral home, hugged, and talked to me. I did not expect that, and I’m not sure that I could ask more. It takes special people to work in hospice. I couldn’t do it.