Working as a hospice caregiver is perhaps one of the most difficult of jobs, as one has to look after people who are terminally ill. If you don’t have a strong heart, this work is not for you.
As a hospice caregiver, you will be providing one on one care to patients who are unable to tend for themselves and depend on help to get about and do their daily chores.
While one does not really need any formal education to work as a hospice caregiver, it is best if one understand the work, and the challenges associated with it, before applying for a job in this capacity. While working at this position, you will often come across instances where your mettle as a human being will be tested.
You have to make sure that you come out on top of this. Resilience, patience, and kindness are virtues that will be exceptionally helpful in this work.
Moreover, you will need to be exceptionally diligent in looking after people by exercising understanding, and kindness, to make their lives easier, and to ensure their wellbeing, both physically and emotionally. When you are working at this position, it is easy to get attached to the people you are tending to, so it is important to be able to be compassionate but keep a distance as well.
Hospice Caregiver Duties & Responsibilities
• Create and maintain effective relationships with healthcare professionals to determine specific care plans for individual patients.
• Evaluate assigned patients’ conditions to determine specifics of illnesses, and ways of managing them in a proper manner.
• Engage newly assigned patients in conversation to determine their personalities and likes and dislikes.
• Assist healthcare personnel in implementing core care plans, and making required changes to them.
• Oversee and monitor patients’ conditions and communicate changes, improvements, and deterioration to the assigned doctor.
• Provide physical support to patients by assisting them with bathing, grooming, and dressing.
• Provide emotional support, through the implementation of a well-placed support care plan.
• Ensure that patients are provided with exceptionally comfortable environments and those that are safe, and conducive to their individual temperaments.
• Administer medication to patients, by ensuring that procedures and protocols of the care plan are followed.
• Manage the symptoms of patients’ disease, aiming to make them as comfortable as possible.
• Provide support to patients’ families, to ensure their acceptance of the condition, and the circumstances of their loved ones.