Hospice For Kids
Creating Meaningful Moments
When a child is stricken with serious illness, parents are oftentimes overwhelmed with emotion and wonder what to do next. Trust in Unity as your first step to help guide you through this challenging time. Our team of experts will keep your child comfortable while providing emotional and spiritual support to your entire family. Now is the time for you and your family to make the most of every day, and for us to help deliver more meaningful moments.
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Hospice For Kids Circle of Care
There’s no single playbook for supporting a child facing serious illness. Unity works closely with your child’s docter to understand the diagnosis. Then, we develop a plan of care based on your wishes and goals to ease your child’s symptoms and live as normally as possible...to just be a kid. It’s important to know that neither you nor your child is alone during this difficult journey. From 24-hour nurse and social worker access, to pain management, emotional support, and spiritual care, we meet the needs of your entire family. You'll have the peace of mind you need that you're doing everything possible for your child.
How We'll Help
We’ll keep your child comfortable while providing your entire family with an extra layer of support.
“What Unity has done to make the biggest difference for us is keeping her home. The fact that she is home and we get to stay together means the world to us. Unity Hospice has helped us manage her symptoms. Everything that they would do in the hospital they have given us the resources and the equipment to do at home”, shares Katie, Willow’s mom.
Frequently Asked Questions
Kids are not just “little adults.” They need a special approach to care with a great deal of expertise. After all, kids have unique needs, and their parents, siblings and loved ones do too. Up to age 21, children and young adults receive a special version of hospice called pediatric hospice care.
Unlike adults receiving hospice care, kids and young adults can continue receiving treatments for their disease while also receiving hospice support. This is called “concurrent care.” There’s no need to choose between comfort and curative measures. Pediatric hospice care seeks to help a patient live as comfortably and fully as possible while providing a emotional and spiritual support to parents, siblings and other family members.
No. Patients are eligible to receive hospice care as long as their physicians determine that they’re still eligible, which usually means their disease is not getting better over time. For children who continue to receive curative therapies, that care can continue for years, or as long as they remain eligible.
You may have heard that hospice care is limited to six months. That’s used as a general timeframe for eligibility, but actual care can last long beyond that. There’s no cut-off as long as a patient remains eligible.
Reach out now. For many families, hospice benefits quickly become an important source of support and comfort. The earlier you connect with this care, the better.
We understand how difficult it can be to take this step. Many people put off asking about hospice, especially when it involves a child, because they associate it with death and dying.
Keep in mind that hospice is about enhancing quality of life. It’s about living the very best life one can live, maintaining hope, providing relief from suffering, and lending support through some of the most challenging times a family can face.
Because of the many unique ways that hospice supports children and their families, we encourage families to ask about it as early as possible.