Palliative Comfort Support
Comfort support, and only comfort support
Company, practical help and steady hours for somebody living with a long-term illness, and for the household around them. Praise Homecare Inc provides non-medical support only, which is why this page says so before it says anything else, and (877) 652-2907 is the number to put that to the test on, day or night.
Being straight with you
Said plainly, before you call rather than after
Two words in the name of this service belong to a licensed field that we are not part of. Getting that wrong wastes a family's week at a point when they have very few weeks to waste, so here is the line, in both directions, before anything else on the page.
This service is
- Somebody in the room, for hours at a time, so nobody is sitting alone with it
- Hands-on personal care where it is wanted: washing, dressing, moving from bed to chair
- Meals cooked to suit an appetite that has gone, and eaten with company
- Light housekeeping and laundry, so the house stops being one more thing
- Medication reminders at the right hour, reminders only, not administration
- Lifts to appointments, and somebody to sit in the waiting room
- Support for the family in the house, who are usually worse than they say
This service is not
- Not the licensed specialty that shares part of its name. If that is what you are looking for, it comes from the practitioners already involved in her care, not from a home care agency
- Not hospice, which is its own certified service. Ours runs alongside hospice, or without it, and never instead of it
- Nothing hands-on to do with the illness itself. No administering medication of any kind, and nothing requiring a license we do not hold
- No advice about her condition, ever. Caregivers report what they notice, and the people qualified to interpret it do the interpreting
Inside the hours
Comfort, unpacked into actual hours
Long illnesses are mostly made of ordinary afternoons. The appointments are the visible part and they are a small fraction of the week. Everything in between is where a family runs out of road: the days that are too long, the meals nobody wants, the tiredness that makes a shower into an expedition.
A caregiver on this service is there for that. Sitting with him while he sleeps in the chair. Putting the cushion where it stops hurting. Reading the paper out loud because his eyes are tired. Cooking small amounts often rather than a meal that defeats him. Getting the shower done on a good morning because the good mornings should not be spent on chores.
Almost every family we see on this service says the same thing eventually: that the hardest part was not the illness but the sense of being a burden to the people they love. A paid, competent, unhurried person in the house changes that arithmetic. He can be tired in front of somebody whose job it is to be there, and stop performing being fine for his daughter.
Alongside everybody else
Rarely the only people coming to the door
By the time this service is arranged there is usually a list on the fridge: a specialist, a family doctor, sometimes home health, sometimes hospice, and a rota of relatives.
Our part is the hours nobody else is covering, which is most of them, and making sure everyone is working from the same account of how the weeks are actually going. A caregiver who is in the house three afternoons a week sees a pattern that a visit every couple of weeks cannot. What she sees goes to the family, and the family takes it to the people qualified to act on it. That is the whole loop, and we do not shortcut any part of it.
The other thing worth saying out loud: the person most likely to break in this arrangement is the well one. Partners and daughters on this service tend to be running on nothing, and cover for them is a separate conversation we would rather have early than at the point of collapse.
A plain conversation
Ask us what we cannot do first
Genuinely, start there. If what you need is the licensed side of this, we will say so in the first two minutes and point you at who does it, and you will have lost nothing. If it is the hours, the meals, the company and the practical running of the house, that is exactly what we are for. The assessment is free and there is nothing to sign. Call (877) 652-2907 at any hour.