Starr Hospice Provides Compassionate Care of the Highest Quality

When your loved one is faced with a life-limiting illness, you want a care team who treats them with compassion, dignity, and respect. It’s perfectly normal to consider curative care. But maybe your family has decided against treatments that could make your loved one uncomfortable in the time they have left. The team At Starr is here to provide guidance and answer your questions about the hospice option.

When the patient’s doctor feels that the underlying condition indicates a life expectancy of six months or less, they qualify for hospice care. Hospice is a special kind of holistic care that is provided in the comfort of home — whether that’s a personal residence, at an assisted living community, or in a nursing home. In most cases, hospice care is fully covered by Medicare or a private insurance plan. That means there’s no out-of-pocket costs for nurse visits, pain medications, personal care supplies, or rented medical equipment like a hospital bed.

Our wish for you is that you seek hospice services as early as possible. Doing so maximizes the physical, emotional, and spiritual care benefits you receive from our team. Learn more about eligibility requirements and when to call on Starr for hospice care.

Our Team Approach

We refer to hospice as as comfort care because the priority is pain and symptom management. Medical monitoring is just one aspect. Most people don’t realize how many resources are part of the hospice program. A full support team works together on all aspects of your loved one’s care.

Starr's team approach ensures that our staff members work together to deliver cohesive, comprehensive care to our patients and families, even after hours and on weekends. Our team communicates regularly to ensure our patients receive the care they deserve and expect from Starr. We consider improvements and setbacks, and we work together so we can deliver a cohesive plan of care. Starr uses a secure electronic patient charting system, so that every team member is up to date on each patient’s healthcare needs and well-being.

Our skilled care team includes:

• Physicians
  The hospice physician complements the services of the attending physician and intervenes to meet the general medical needs of the terminally ill patient. Important functions of the hospice physician include the certification of the patient’s terminal illness, review of the hospice care plan, consultation visits, direction of the interdisciplinary group conferences, as well as overall program evaluation to ensure quality of care and appropriateness of care/services.
• Nurses
  Hospice nurses have one of a variety of roles including case manager, nurse practitioner, LVN visit nurse, and after-hours nurse. The RN case manager serves as the interdisciplinary team coordinator for all patients/families assigned to that team. The primary responsibilities of the case manager include assessment of patient/family needs, planning and organizing care to be provided, and implementing the approved plan of care. Additionally, the case manager supervises and evaluates the quality of care provided by the entire team.
• Social Workers
  Starr's social workers are your advocates. Because there are many things that impact a patient’s life, our social workers get to know patients from many aspects and convey information to the care team. Social workers offer many interventions for hospice patients and their families including providing counsel, support, and advice about terminal conditions; facilitating communication within the family; helping with MediCal, Medicare, Social Security, IHSS, and Disability applications; assisting with completion of advance healthcare directives, power of attorney, and other legal considerations; referring families to appropriate agencies for in-home help, financial aid, and miscellaneous needs; and coordinating arrangements after death.
• Spiritual Care Counselors
  Starr's spiritual care counselors, also called chaplains, seek to discover where a patient finds connection and value. We support you in strengthening those connections, as well as healing any losses that may be impacting you. The hospice experience is an opportunity to heal and deepen relationships, forgive one another, and say thank you before saying good-bye. Starr Hospice spiritual care services are based on unconditional acceptance of and respect for your religious beliefs and practices, whether you are agnostic, humanist, atheist, devoutly religious, or somewhere in between. Our spiritual care counselors know that, at times, the best medicine is an open heart, a listening ear, a warm hand to hold, or a shoulder to cry on. We may provide rituals, a beautiful song, a prayer, or a blessing. We can assist with planning and officiating funerals and memorials or connect you with community clergy from your own faith tradition when desired.
• Home Health Aides
  Under the supervision of the RN case manager, home health aides provide personal care such as grooming and dressing, oral hygiene, motion exercises, bathing, incontinence care, assistance with ambulation, bedside activities (listening, writing letters, reading), and communication with the family. For patients residing in a nursing facility, hospice home health aides provide care above and beyond the care that the facility is already obligated to provide. In other words, they add to rather than replace normal or routine nursing care. On average, the hospice home health aide will visit two to three times each week with each visit lasting one to two hours.
• Volunteers
  Starr's volunteers support our hospice families by providing family caregiver relief, visiting with patients, offering alternative therapies such as canine comfort, holding vigil at the bedside, and other activities at the patient’s home – wherever home may be.
• Dementia Support
  Starr's Living With Dementia program educates and trains our staff, volunteers, hospice families, and the local community about dementia. Our education series helps caregivers understand how people living with dementia communicate their needs and desires through behaviors when language fails; teaches tactics to assess, interpret, and respond to your loved one to foster an improved quality of life; and offers strategies for handling behaviors such as wandering, delusions, and aggression.
• Nutrition Counseling
  Starr's dietitian is available as a resource to team members as well as our hospice families to provide assistance with nutritional issues that occur with the terminally ill. Tasks include nutritional assessment of the patient, recommendations for nutrient intake, and education to patients and/or family regarding nutrition/hydration issues.
• Grief Support Providers
  Starr provides complimentary grief support to adults, teens, and children.  We will help you process your loss and learn how to move forward without your loved one. Grief support is provided by grief counselors who listen to you, seek to understand how grief is affecting you, help you identify the right support, and help you find meaning in your loss.

Why You Should Start Hospice Sooner Than Later

Making the decision to start hospice care for your loved one is overwhelming. It means acknowledging that the end is near. But the decision is also empowering, because an array of supportive care and assistance becomes available to both the patient and family. Click here to read more on this topic.

What Cities Does Starr Hospice Serve?

Starr Hospice serves patients throughout the Tri-Valley and neighboring cities of the San Francisco East Bay Area. Click here to view a map.

A Note About Our Limitations

We sometimes get questions about California’s End-of-Life Option Act (SB 380). Hospice is designed to neither hasten nor postpone a natural death. Starr does not participate in assisting with EOLOA, but we support each individual’s personal decision and will continue care with our regular services.

MD REFERRAL FORM – HOSPICE SELF/FAMILY REFERRAL FORM – HOSPICE