2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
For many, the word hospice and everything associated with it is associated with death, despair, fear, pain, loss and suffering. In fact, a hospice is a medical institution whose main purpose is to provide palliative care to seriously ill patients.
The WHO defines palliative care as an approach aimed at improving the quality of life of patients and their families facing severe illness. The main goal of palliative care is to relieve pain and other symptoms of the disease, provide the psychological help and other support needed by the patient and his family at the end of life and after bereavement.
Palliative care treats dying as a natural process and does not seek to delay or hasten the onset of death.
In addition to relieving physical symptoms, psychological support is a very important aspect of hospice palliative care. Faced with a serious illness, a person experiences the loss of his usual way of life and health, loss of home, work, and favorite things.
A psychologist, working in a hospice, helps a patient and his family to survive grief, to accept their condition and impending death, but at the same time to live and live with meaning.
The requirements for a psychologist in a hospice are quite high: the ability to listen without judgment, a high level of respect for a sick person, his choice and life principles, the ability to correctly assess the patient's capabilities, mental state and strength.
Working in a hospice as a volunteer was a deliberate choice for me. Before, I read a lot of specialized literature, worked for more than 5 months in the children's oncology department and lived my own losses in personal therapy.
Starting from early childhood, my grandmother took me to all the funerals of her friends and our relatives, brought me to the house of dying people. At the same time, all our visits were accompanied by life-affirming conversations, jokes and acceptance, despite the severity of the condition of the person we were visiting. This invaluable experience helped me many times, when, being at the bedside of a dying person, I could easily compliment him, joke and create an atmosphere of life and hope here and now.
An important quality for a psychologist in a hospice, in my opinion, is the ability to be aware of your fear and be able to live with it, and especially to work as a psychologist. A specialist who is at the mercy of the fear of death, fear of loss of health and is simply very afraid to be near a seriously ill person will multiply these fears. Such a state is unlikely to be able to alleviate the patient's condition, improve his emotional background and help to find hope, meaning in his illness.
While helping hospice patients, I spent a lot of time listening to what was important to them here and now, and sometimes we just kept silent together. Tears and smiles of gratitude from dying people, their sincere glances told me that I was doing everything right. At such moments, people open the most secret corners of their souls and share feelings, experience, knowledge, and sometimes what they could not tell anyone throughout their lives.
The psychologist in the hospice is a calming figure, accepting without any prejudice or criticism. I hope my experience will help novice psychologists who want, but are afraid to try themselves in this kind of work.
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