Patient & Family Support
The Support Services team at St Andrew’s Hospice are here to support patients’ families in addition to patients; responding to and addressing emotional, psychological, social and spiritual needs.
Download our Support Services leaflet
Download our Common Grief Reactions leaflet
The support team offer support to relatives in coping with the emotional and practical implications of the patient’s illness and prognosis.
This may involve:
- Assisting with a variety of practical needs including; anticipatory care planning, working in partnership with community based staff and other relevant agencies or other hospice professionals to achieve patient goals, identifying carer needs and making referrals to carer support organisations where appropriate.
- Facilitating improved communications between patients and their families and between individual family members.
- Supporting patients and family members coping with transition loss, anticipatory grief and related issues.
Spiritual and Religious Care
It is widely recognized that the spiritual is a natural and integral dimension of what it means to be human, and includes the awareness of self, of relationships with others and with creation.
Health and Social Care Scotland recognises that questions of meaning, purpose, hope, or the lack of it, identity and relationship become acute when wellbeing and stability are threatened by illness, injury or loss in oneself or in a loved one. At such times people may need spiritual or religious care.
Spiritual care can be given in one to one or group relationships, is person-centred and makes no assumptions about personal conviction or life orientation. Spiritual care:
- Offers a space in which individuals and their needs are regarded as central;
- Offers person-centred rather than staff-centred care;
- Elicits and honours an individual’s story;
- Journeys with an individual further into the pain, darkness, uncertainty or unknowing;
- Holds out the possibility of other ways of seeing or understanding, without imposing personal views or frameworks;
- Fosters autonomy and self-management rather than dependence and direction;
- Is characterised by an equitable, respectful and non-judgemental relationship between two human beings.
Religious care is given in the context of the shared religious beliefs, values, liturgies and lifestyles of a faith community.
Spiritual care is not necessarily religious.
Religious care should always be spiritual.
Among the basic spiritual needs that might be addressed within the
normal, daily activity of healthcare are:
- The need to give and receive love
- The need to be understood
- The need to be valued as a human being
- The need for forgiveness, hope and trust
- The need to explore beliefs and values
- The need to express feelings honestly
- The need to find meaning and purpose in life
Feelings such as isolation, loneliness, fear, abandonment, distrust, and grief can sometimes be companions to acute illness.
Spiritual care can assist our patients to maintain or re-establish trust, strength and hope and to continue to demonstrate the dignity and uniqueness of their lives.
All staff at St Andrew’s Hospice try to give assistance in these matters supported by the Pastoral and Spiritual Care Team.
Grieving allows us to heal, to remember with love rather than pain. It is a sorting process; letting go of the things that are gone and mourning for them while taking hold of the things that have become part of who you are and build again.
Grief affects different people in different ways and can cause intense emotional pain that is difficult to recover from. Grief encompasses a broad range of feelings and behaviours that are common after a loss.
St Andrew’s Hospice offers specialist palliative care, not only for the patient, but also for family members and carers. It is most important that family members and carers are emotionally and spiritually supported, both prior to and post death in a sensitive manner.
We can offer further help and advice if people have problems of a highly personal nature, calling on our highly skilled hospice staff, one to one support is available if necessary.
10 tips for family caregivers:
- Choose to take charge of your life, and don’t let your loved one’s illness or disability always take centre stage
- Remember to be good to yourself. Love, honour and value yourself. You’re doing a very hard job and you deserve some quality time, just for you
- Watch out for signs of depression, and don’t delay in getting professional help when you need it
- When people offer to help, accept the offer and suggest specific things that they can do
- Educate yourself about your loved one’s condition. Information is empowering.
- There’s a difference between caring and doing. Be open to technologies and ideas that promote your loved one’s independence
- Trust your instincts, most of the time they’ll lead you in the right direction
- Grieve for your losses, and then allow yourself to dream new dreams
- Stand up for your rights as a caregiver and a citizen
- Seek support from other caregivers. There is great strength in knowing you are not alone.
Children’s Support Service
The Children’s Support Service is designed to provide children with some insight into illness and grief and to help them put this into the perspective of a general life experience. The service provides children, families and carers with a safe and inviting place in which to ask questions relevant to their situation. The service also supports parents and carers to be more aware of the children’s thoughts and feelings and enables them to deal with them in the most appropriate and sensitive way.
Members of the Support Team, specially trained sessional staff and carefully selected and trained volunteers staff the service which takes place each Friday from 4.30pm – 6.00pm
For more information about our Children’s Support Service, please download our leaflet.
A Whole School Approach to Loss and Bereavement, a reference toolkit, providing information to help teachers support children and young people during times of loss, change and bereavement.