The Prince George Hospice Palliative Care Society is looking at bringing a “Hospice Centre” to Prince George.
Executive Director Donna Flood said Hospice is conducting a feasibility study on the Centre to understand what’s in the community, and where there are gaps in care.
“We’re talking to people with those life-limiting illnesses or the people that care for them, as well as the healthcare providers and the service providers and trying to find out, is there a need for this?” Flood said.
“Once we identify what those needs are, then we’ll go into phase two, right now phase one is our feasibility, phase two will be understanding what the services are that the community needs and developing a plan on how to deliver those.”
Flood added that could include development of architectural designs for a facility, or utilizing what is already in the community.
“What we do know is people that are living with a life-ending illness, people that maybe have non-treatable cancer, COPD, diabetes, there’s certain aspects of their care that could lose gaps,” Flood said.
“We get extremely good clinical care here in Prince George, but that holistic approach to care where we’re caring for the caregiver, or we’re helping people with education and learning and nutrition, or it may be as simple as providing people with a bath or a shower.”
Flood added it will help with capacity in the community.
“The other thing we sort of envision is a bit of respite care, so that those that choose to stay at home, it gives the caregiver a little bit of a break, to be able to put someone somewhere for a week or two you know is going to be safe,” she said.
“What we see in the Hospice House, we sometimes get calls because the caregiver, there may be an 89-year-old man that is sick at home, being looked after by his wife, she needs to get her hips done but she can’t leave the home, so they’re asking us to at least take her loved one until she can recover, but we don’t necessarily always have the capacity, so building capacity in the community, so caregivers can feel supported, and the more a caregiver is supported, the longer people can stay in their homes.”
In addition to the feasibility study, Hospice has a goal of having a special reserve fund of $1 million by 2026.
“You don’t want to enter into anything and not have the resources or the funding to carry forward with the feasibility study, so we need to have seed money in order to do this,” Flood said.
“Once the feasibility study is completed, then we need to look at what the services are and the development of the building, that costs money, architectural drawings, permits, all of that, there’s a cost to it, so we don’t want to go down a road and have to stop because we don’t have the resources.”
Flood noted much of that money will be coming from grants.
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