Day one
The call and the visit
Our intake coordinator takes your information, confirms coverage, and speaks with the physician. The admission visit happens — usually the same day — to assess symptoms and explain the benefit before you sign anything.
Family resources
Plain answers to the questions families actually ask.
Most people learn about hospice in the middle of a crisis. This page is here so you can learn about it a little earlier, and a little more calmly.
First things first
What hospice is — and what it isn’t.
Hospice is
- A form of active medical care focused on comfort, dignity and quality of life
- A team — physician, nurse, aide, social worker, chaplain, volunteer — coordinated around one household
- Available wherever a person lives: house, apartment, family home, assisted living, nursing facility
- Fully covered for most patients under the Medicare hospice benefit, including medications and equipment
- Support for the whole household, continuing for thirteen months after a death
- Reversible at any time, for any reason
Hospice isn’t
- A place you are sent to. Nearly all hospice care happens at home
- Giving up, or hastening death. Some patients live longer with good symptom care
- Only for the final days. Most families later wish they had called weeks or months earlier
- The end of your relationship with your own doctor, who can stay involved throughout
- Twenty-four-hour bedside nursing. Visits are scheduled, with a nurse on call at all hours
- Only for cancer. Heart, lung, kidney, liver, neurologic disease and dementia all qualify
Timing
When it may be time to consider hospice.
No single sign decides it. But when several of these are true, a hospice conversation is usually worth having — even if the answer turns out to be “not yet.”
- Two or more hospital admissions or emergency visits in the past six months
- Noticeable weight loss, or less interest in eating and drinking
- More time spent in bed or in a chair than up and about
- Increasing pain, breathlessness, confusion or falls
- Treatments are causing more suffering than benefit
- A physician has said that further treatment is unlikely to change the outcome
- The patient says, in whatever words they use, that they have had enough
The first two weeks
What to expect after you call.
Days 1–2
Equipment and medications
A hospital bed, oxygen, or whatever else is needed is delivered, often within hours. A comfort medication kit is placed in the home and the nurse teaches you exactly how and when to use it.
Week one
The team arrives
You meet your nurse case manager, the aide, the social worker and — if you wish — the chaplain. Together you set the visit schedule and write down the goals that matter to your family.
Week two
The plan settles
The team meets to review your plan of care and adjust it. By now most families report better symptom control, and a phone number they trust.
Any hour
When something changes
Call the main number. Our intake coordinator answers, advises, and sends a nurse out if needed — nights, weekends and holidays included. This is the part families tell us matters most.
Afterward
Bereavement follow-up
Our bereavement team contacts you within two weeks and stays in touch for thirteen months, with counseling and support groups available whenever you want them.
Cost
How hospice is paid for.
For most families, hospice is the least expensive part of a serious illness — and often the only part with no bills attached.
Medicare hospice benefit
Medicare Part A covers hospice in full for eligible patients: team visits, medications related to the terminal illness, medical equipment and supplies, inpatient and respite care, and bereavement services. There is no deductible, and copayments are minimal or none. This is how roughly four in five of our patients are covered.
Medi-Cal & Medicaid
California’s Medi-Cal hospice benefit mirrors Medicare’s coverage, including room and board in a skilled nursing facility for dually eligible patients. Our social worker can help you apply if you are not yet enrolled.
Private insurance & VA
Most commercial plans, Medicare Advantage plans and TRICARE include a hospice benefit; details vary, and we verify yours before admission so there are no surprises. Veterans may also be eligible through VA community care.
If you are uninsured
Call us anyway. We provide a limited number of charity-care admissions each year through our community fund and will help you pursue any benefit you may qualify for. No one is turned away from a conversation.
Grief & bereavement
Support that continues after the funeral.
Grief does not follow a schedule, and it rarely arrives in tidy stages. For thirteen months after a death our bereavement team stays in contact by phone and by mail, and everything we offer is free — to our families and to anyone in the community who asks.
Support groups meet monthly: a spouses’ group, a group for adult children, and a group for parents who have lost a child. Children and teens meet separately with a counselor trained in youth grief. Every autumn we hold a remembrance gathering where families read the names of the people they have lost.
Questions
Thirty questions, answered plainly.
We keep a full list of the questions families ask us most — about eligibility and timing, what the benefit pays for, who comes to the house, what happens at three in the morning, and what to expect at the very end. It is searchable, and it is written the way we would answer on the phone.
You don’t have to decide anything today. You can just ask a question.
Call and our intake coordinator will talk it through with you — no pressure, no obligation, no cost.