EN 
ES Hospice Care
Our hospice care provides medical, emotional and spiritual support, allowing patients and families to focus on what’s truly important when life matters most.
Stay in the Comfort of Your Home
Avatar provides hospice care for patients with a terminal illness that are no longer receiving treatment. Hospice is the philosophy that people facing advanced terminal disease should have every opportunity to enjoy life to the fullest and to have dignity and comfort in every day of life. Hospice is also a healthcare program wherein patients in the advanced stages of terminal disease receive as much care as possible in the comfort of home, and this care focuses on symptom management, supporting the family, comfort, and quality of life.
Avatar provides hospice for metropolitan Houston, The Woodlands, Montgomery, and Harris county as a Joint Commission Accredited, Medicare-certified provider. We are members of both the Texas Association for Home Care and Hospice and the Texas & New Mexico Hospice Organization. Our team includes more than 150 caring professionals, many bi-lingual, and all ready to provide comprehensive, coordinated, compassionate and responsive service.
Our Team Can Help With All of Your Needs
The wide range of licensed healthcare professionals at Avatar Home Health and Hospice makes it possible for our team to competently deliver a range of important medical services in your home. Our services include:
Nursing
Nurses provide a wide variety of hands-on medical care and skilled teaching. This may include advanced pain control, other symptom management, nutritional intervention, and more.
Volunteers
Trained volunteers serve as an invaluable part of the hospice team. They can help with companionship, emotional support, and support with household chores, so that patients and family can better focus on their quality time together.
Caregiver Training
With the right support, family usually wants to be involved in the care of a loved-one with advanced illness. Our nurses and aides take the time to train family caregivers in all skills important to the care of the loved one. This may include managing home infusion, watching for signs and symptoms, how to help a person walk safely, how to change bed linens with a loved one still in the bed, and a very wide variety of skills as needed by the family.
Care Plan
Avatar's hospice nurses or social workers can help with care planning issues such as managing insurance benefits, power of attorney forms, DNR orders, and other concerns.
Pastoral Counselors
When desired by a patient, Avatar can send a pastoral counselor to help both patients and family with emotional and spiritual support.
Therapy Services
Speech, occupational, and physical therapists can visit a hospice patient's home as needed to help with adaptive equipment, feeding challenges, and other issues.
Aides
Trained and experienced home care aides provide personal care including bathing, changing linens, light housework, and more.
Advantages of Hospice Care
When the time is right, Avatar’s hospice care offers a number of advantages to patients and families.
Quality of Life
When doctors are offering a prognosis of six months or less, research consistently shows that home hospice care delivers a higher family-rated quality of life than other healthcare routes.
Improved Symptom Control
Hospice specializes in enhanced control of serious symptoms in advanced disease. Research demonstrates that home hospice services do a better job of controlling most symptoms than other care settings including the hospital and nursing home.
Comfort and Convenience
During advanced illness, without hospice, trips to the emergency room, hospital admissions, and nursing home admissions can be frequent. Home hospice nursing enables patients to spend more time in the privacy and comfort of home in the company of loved ones.
Length of Life
People often assume that when curative treatment ends, life must shorten. When your doctor's prognosis is six months or less, research actually demonstrates that hospice services tend to increase length of life by days to months - while also increasing family-rated quality of life scores. It turns out that symptom control and emotional support can give patients more strength and endurance than usual care or aggressive curative treatments - when the timing is right.
Improved Bereavement Status
Hospice care offers important emotional support for both patient and family. Additionally, home hospice allows family caregivers to participate in the care of a loved one, but with enough support so that quality time can be spent with the loved one as well. Research demonstrates that this type of support improves the emotional health of spouses during and after bereavement.
Our Services are Affordable
Heal Your Wounds Faster With Wound Care
One of the strong advantages our nurses have in the delivery of wound care is that Avatar nurses are trained and equipped to deliver negative pressure wound therapy (NPWT) also known as WoundVac and Vacuum Assisted Closure. Compared to traditional wound care methods, this equipment is shown to heal chronic wounds 160% faster and decrease the bacterial load in infected wounds 1000 times better.
About WoundVac
The process of V.A.C. therapy involves placing sterile foam in the wound and applying an air-tight dressing. Then the V.A.C. device applies continuous, controlled, vacuum pressure. The suction removes problematic fluids and deposits them in a disposable container. Removing chronic swelling this way increases productive localized blood flow. The negative pressure also accelerates the growth of wound healing tissue.
For some patients, a mini-VAC may be available. This is a portable unit that can be worn while walking.
Testimonial
Negative Pressure Wound Therapy (NPWT) | Nigel… by as-KCI. A career military man, Nigel was about to face his toughest battle. Complications to an abdominal surgery left Nigel with exposed intestines through a large, open wound. With the help of the V.A.C. Therapy System, his wound progressed enough to be discharged in just eight weeks, rather than the five or six months his doctors had estimated. Using a portable V.A.C. Therapy System, he was able to return to his daily routine while his wound continued to heal. And that, says Nigel, is worthy of a medal.
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There is nothing more important than a good, safe & secure home.
Let us help you live at home with the care services you need.
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