What is hospice palliative care?

Hospice is not about a building, it is a philosophy of care

Palliative care - to give comfort

Hospice palliative care is a special type of care for patients and families confronted with life-limiting illness; it is a holistic approach to providing the best possible quality of life for these patients.

Hospice palliative care affirms life.

Hospice provides support and care for patients and families/whanau so that they may live as fully and as comfortably as possible.

Hospice recognises dying as a normal process and neither hastens nor postpones death.

Hospice recognises grief as a normal response to loss. Support to families and caregivers continues into the bereavement period.

The focus of hospice care is on quality of life, for both the patient and their families.

All Hospice services are offered free of charge to those assessed as needing our support.

Tuku whaka oki oki

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Modern hospice came from...

"You matter because you are you. You matter to the last moment of your life, and we will do all we can, not only to help you die peacefully, but also to live until you die."

Dame Cicely Saunders founded the first modern hospice and, more than anybody else, was responsible for establishing the discipline and the culture of palliative care. She introduced effective pain management and insisted that dying people needed dignity, compassion, and respect, as well as rigorous scientific methodology in the testing of treatments. She abolished the prevailing ethic that patients should be cured, that those who could not be cured were a sign of failure, and that it was acceptable and even desirable to lie to them about their prognosis.  

 

Learn more about Dame Cicely Saunders...

Cicely Mary Strode Saunders was born in Barnet, Hertfordshire, in 1918, the eldest of three children.

Cicely Mary Strode Saunders, medical director St Christopher’s Hospice 1967-85 (b Barnet, Hertfordshire, 22 June 1918; q St Thomas’ Hospital, London, 1957; OM, DBE, FRCP), died 14 July 2005.

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