Public hospital board OKs hospice program

COLFAX – Whitman County Public Hospital District No. 3 commissioners unanimously approved establishing a new hospice care program.

During the regular Wednesday, Dec. 18, meeting, Dr. Peter Edminister reported that a contract was needed to allow Gentiva Dr. Eric Sohn to admit patients, write orders, direct nurses and more at Whitman Hospital.

Gentiva is the only hospice provider in the St. John area and it is having staffing troubles, Edminster said. With the staffing shortage, hospice providers there need a place for patients to receive care when caregivers need a break.

Commissioner Cherry Alice Van Time asked if Colfax Courtyard Assisted Living patients were admissible in the past.

“Not under hospice,” Edminster said, noting that’s why the program was suggested.

Typically when someone on hospice needs to be admitted to a hospital, they are discharged from hospice, he said. The new program would allow hospice patients receiving 24-hour care to be admitted to Whitman Hospital, 1200 W. Fairview St.

“We’re not admitting these folks for acute medical illnesses,” he said. “This for folks who are in hospice who are at their baseline status and their caregiver needs respite.

So, we bring them in for 2-3 days and provide that, still under hospice.”

Commissioner Bob Vuletich asked if “comfort care” and hospice are two different programs.

“They are two different things,” Edminstor said, adding comfort care is for people who are imminently dying.

“We think your prognosis is going to be on the order of days to weeks,” he said, adding that weeks would be the maximum to which they can keep the person in the hospital and do everything that hospice would be doing at home.

“Oftentimes that is for people whose family does not have the capability or the resources to be able to take care of them at home,” he said. “Alternatively if you have family who are able to provide most of your care and just need some assistance from hospice, then you go home.”

According to Edminster, those patients are looking at a longer slower process from home.

“Off the top, of my head I can think of four people in St. John alone that I’m routinely doing house calls on because their caregivers are so exhausted from the 24/7 that it’s just they can’t even get them out of the house,” Edminster said. “This is a really valuable community service to be able to provide. I was very very happy to see this option come across the table.”

Edminster said hospice is covered as a Medicare benefit.

“Once you are admitted on hospice, any medical expense that you have comes out of the hospice budget,” he reported, adding they are then paying an in-patient hospital admission.

“This is a workaround that allows us to do this kind of on the cheap where they’re not getting charged for our services, they’re not getting charged for full hospital services,” he said. “It’s a way people do not have to be discharged from hospice into this whole dance of discharging, readmitting and all of that.”

“I can’t remember if they are still doing that in Endicott or not, but there are a lot of little towns in the area where they just say, we can’t send people that far, we don’t have the staff,” he said.

“I think it sounds like a good beneficial program,” Beckmann said after approval.