When you are a caretaker responsible for your elderly family member, you may face difficult decisions everyday. This can be overwhelming and affect your (the caregiver’s) own well-being. This article is intended to provide support when it is most needed and to discuss the difference between respite care and palliative care, either of which may be a solution worth considering. It is important to remember that caregivers need care, as well. When caretakers are tired and frustrated, patients can suffer too.
What is Respite Care?
Respite care provides needed short-term relief and breaks to overwhelmed caregivers. Think of it like a substitute teacher. This temporary care can be provided by friends, family members, or a professional in-home health care service to help an ailing senior with eating, medication, appointments, and daily hygiene. In addition to in-home respite care, a caregiver may use a specific daycare center, as well.
Caregivers looking after someone with Alzheimer’s, dementia, stroke, or other serious illness should be able to take a break without experiencing feelings of guilt and anxiety, which is one of the primary respite care benefits. Upon his or her return from a short period of self-care, the caretaker can focus on the patient’s well-being with renewed enthusiasm.
What is Palliative Care?
Palliative Care focuses on medical care for the elderly with a serious illness that goes beyond requiring help with day-to-day care. Palliative care explained comes down to offering relief from medical symptoms (such as cancer, heart disease, etc.) and enhancing the patient’s quality of life, as well as helping the family and caregivers. Palliative care is best implemented as soon as the patient receives the diagnosis. A cure may not be possible, so usually, the main objective is to ease the pain and symptoms.
During palliative care, a team of medical professionals will include doctors, nurses, nutritionists, and spiritual guidance to support both the patient and the caretakers.
Such care can be provided at specialized medical facilities, hospitals, and at home. Caregivers and medical specialists need to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of where the patient will be cared for and what that care will consist of. The patient will likely favor remaining in the familiar surroundings of his or her home.
The chief medical professional can visit the home regularly to check on the patient and discuss the needed care with the care providers and check on them, as well. Being a palliative caretaker is a difficult undertaking which can include giving medications, monitoring symptoms, wound care, and more. A part of the medical professional’s challenge is to work with the caregiver to prevent him or her from becoming overwhelmed.
What are the Main Differences Between Respite Care and Palliative Care?
Respite care and palliative care involve providing the best care to an ailing senior. The essential difference is that respite care provides a needed break for the caregiver and is always temporary. The patient can receive short-term or interim care at a medical facility or from a health care provider who provides necessary care in the patient’s own home, such as preparing meals, assisting with hygiene, and arranging socializing events. Respite care ensures that the caregiver has time off for needed self-care. That, essentially, is respite care explained.
Palliative care focuses on someone suffering from a serious and/or complex illness, either terminal or non-terminal, which requires specific ongoing medical care in addition to day-to-day caregiving. The goal is to create a medical and care provider team whose goal is to make the patient as comfortable as possible.
What are the Benefits of each?
Both respite care vs. palliative care are means of providing the best care for someone who is ill.
The purpose – and benefit of – respite care is to give a temporary break to the caretaker from the usual duties of seeing to the needs of the patient (personal grooming, cooking, companionship, etc.). A temporary replacement, either another family member or professional caregiver, will temporarily tend to the patient’s needs. The benefits of the caregiver being given the time off to attend to self-care cannot be overstated. And the patient will benefit from a more relaxed, less overwhelmed caregiver upon his or her return. Respite care is win-win.
Palliative care adds the need for medical assistance to respite care to help reduce the symptoms of different types of serious illness and to make critical healthcare decisions. The benefit of a medical team and a caretaker working together is that it improves the patient’s quality of life, and the patient may recover more quickly.
Both respite care vs. palliative care will provide the patient and caretaker with different but distinct benefits and an improved quality of life. When there is a serious illness, everyone benefits when they work together.
Can Respite Care Support Palliative Care?
It has been shown that respite care very much supports palliative care and is an intricate part of such care. Healthcare providers, the patient, and the caregiver can easily become overwhelmed. Respite care, a self-care break for caregivers, will help everyone involved in palliative care function better as all continue to provide the best care available.