Palliative Care Services - Hopeful Journey

Hopeful Journey services are for people who choose life-prolonging treatment and/or those with a life expectancy more than six months and do not qualify for hospice services.

Those who do not qualify for hospice care may benefit from the type of comprehensive, coordinated supportive services which Hopeful Journey is able to provide.

Palliative care aims to relieve suffering and improve the quality of living and dying through the comprehensive management of the physical, psychological, social, spiritual and existential needs experienced by patients confronting serious, life threatening and terminal illnesses and by their families.

It may complement and enhance disease modifying therapy, or it may become the total focus of the patient's care.

Who qualifies for the Hopeful Journey program?

1) People with advanced, life limiting illness such as:

• Cancer
• Heart disease
• Lung disease
• ALS (Lou Gehrig disease) or other neuromuscular disease
• Kidney or liver disease
• HIV/AIDS
• Children with chronic disease

2) Services ordered by a physician or nurse practitioner

3) Life expectancy of 12 months or less

4) Live in Willamette Valley Hospice service area (Marion and Polk counties)

How are the services paid for?

• Kaiser Permanente covers for qualified patients
• Coverage may be negotiated
• Fee-for-service

What does Hopeful Journey include?

• In home nursing, social work, spiritual counselor, personal care, restorative therapy, physical or occupational therapy

• Formal assessment and treatment of physical, psychosocial, and spiritual symptoms
• Registered Nurse on call 24 hours a day
• Advance care planning and patient centered decision making consistent with the patient's values and preferences
• Ongoing communication with the referring physician or nurse practitioner
• Care coordination to streamline access to services and to monitor quality of care
• Guidance to help patients and families cope with progressing illness and issues of life closure
• Crisis prevention and early crisis management
• Bereavement care

What are our goals of care?

• Help you to carry on with roles and meaningful and valuable experiences for as long as possible
• Relief from symptoms such as pain
• Advance care planning assistance with difficult decision making
• Adaptation to illness and issues of life closure
• Promoting opportunities for the patient and family to grow and develop even in the face of advance illness
• Respect for individual values and choices of care
• Preserve dignity
• Improve quality of life
• Improve self management abilities
• Reduce or avoid hospitalization
• Improve knowledge of and access to appropriate community services