Everything a family needs, brought to one address.

Most people would rather be at home, and most people can be. A registered nurse visits on a regular schedule — usually one to three times a week, more often when things change — and a hospice aide comes for bathing, grooming, linens and light personal care. Medications related to the terminal diagnosis, medical equipment, and supplies arrive at the house and are managed by us, not by you.

• Registered nurse case manager assigned to your family
• Hospice aide visits for bathing and personal care
• Hospital bed, oxygen, wheelchair and supplies delivered and serviced
• Comfort medication kit kept in the home for symptom flares
• On-call nurse reachable in one phone call, day or night

Sometimes symptoms outrun what can be managed at home, and sometimes a caregiver is simply exhausted. General inpatient care provides short, intensive symptom management at a partner hospital or skilled nursing facility until things settle and you can return home. Respite care offers up to five consecutive days of covered care in a facility so that a spouse or adult child can sleep, travel, or recover.

• Short-stay inpatient care for crisis symptom control
• Up to five days of respite care, covered by the Medicare benefit
• Continuous home care during a period of acute need
• Coordination with partner facilities across Southern California

Comfort is clinical work. Our medical director and nurses build a plan for pain, shortness of breath, nausea, constipation, agitation, anxiety and poor sleep, then revisit it constantly — because a plan that worked last Tuesday may not work today. We aim for the smallest effective dose so that people stay as alert and as themselves as possible.

• Physician-directed medication plans reviewed at every visit
• Breathlessness and oxygen management
• Non-drug comfort measures: positioning, mouth care, music, touch
• Family teaching so you know exactly what to give, and when

Our chaplain arrives with no agenda. For some families that means prayer, scripture, sacraments, or contact with a home congregation, mosque or temple. For others it means talking about regret, forgiveness, or a life’s work — or sitting in silence. Spiritual care is offered to every patient and every family member, and it is always yours to decline.

• Visits shaped by your own faith tradition, or by none
• Coordination with your clergy or faith community
• Life review, legacy letters, and recorded memories
• Vigil presence and prayer at the bedside
• Memorial and funeral planning support

A serious illness brings paperwork, money questions and family disagreements along with it. Our medical social worker helps with advance directives and POLST forms, Medi-Cal and veterans’ benefits, safety at home, placement when home is no longer possible, and the family meeting where everyone finally says what they have been thinking.

• Advance directive and POLST completion
• Benefits navigation: Medicare, Medi-Cal, VA, private insurance
• Family meetings and conflict mediation
• Community resource referrals and placement assistance
• Individual and family counseling

Our work with a family does not end at a death. For thirteen months afterward, our bereavement team stays in touch by phone and mail, offers individual grief counseling, and runs support groups for spouses, adult children and grieving parents. Children and teenagers get their own age-appropriate support, because grief at eight years old does not look like grief at fifty.

• Thirteen months of structured follow-up after a death
• Individual grief counseling with a licensed counselor
• Monthly support groups
• Children’s and teen grief programs
• Annual remembrance gathering each autumn

Trained volunteers give the ordinary human things that medicine cannot bill for: reading a novel aloud, watching a ballgame, writing letters, walking the dog, or sitting quietly with a patient so a wife can nap without worrying. Volunteers are screened, trained for thirty hours, and matched thoughtfully — often by shared language, faith, or a common trade.

• Companionship visits, reading aloud and conversation
• Respite sitting so caregivers can rest or run errands
• Errands, groceries and pet care
• Veteran-to-veteran volunteer pairing
• Bilingual volunteers: Spanish, Armenian, Korean, Tagalog and Mandarin