Two hospices can look nearly the same on paper and differ a great deal on the phone. When you choose, you are not choosing a brochure. You are choosing the team that will come to the house, answer the call when the house is quiet, and tell you plainly what is happening. Put the same questions to each agency, write the answers down in the same order, and set the pages side by side.
Local option: New Plan Care gives families in the St. Louis area in-home help so a parent can stay home: companionship, help with bathing and dressing, meals, and overnight care. Call (314) 405-0887.
Ask who is on the team and how often each one comes
Ask for the team by role: the nurse who manages the plan, the aide who visits for personal care, the social worker, the chaplain or spiritual counselor, the volunteer program, and the bereavement staff. For each role, ask how often that person visits in a normal week and who decides when the schedule changes. Visit frequency is written in the plan of care, so ask to see that page rather than relying on the intake person's description of it.
Check the public record before the call
Medicare's Care Compare website lists certified hospices. Find each agency there, confirm its address and the areas it says it serves, and read what its listing reports. Ask each agency to explain in its own words anything the listing shows that you do not understand. A listing will not tell you how a nurse sounds at the bedside, but it tells you which claims you can check yourself rather than take on trust.
Ask for the exclusions in writing
Every hospice has a list of what it does not do. Heavy housekeeping, sitting through a full night, transport to appointments outside the plan, and equipment it does not supply are common examples. Ask each agency for that list in writing. A hospice that answers this clearly is giving you something you can compare. A hospice that answers only out loud has given you a conversation, which is harder to hold to later.
Ask how they reach you and how they reach each other
Ask how you reach the hospice when a question is not urgent and how the same question gets handled when it is. Ask whether the nurse who knows your household is the one who returns the call, and whether the hospice has a single shared record that every visiting person reads and writes. Note whether the answers name a person, a role, or only a number. Each answer tells you something different about the team you would be joining.
Keep the answers side by side
Put each agency's answers in one column of the same page: team roles, visit pattern, the way you reach the team, the supply list, and the written exclusions. Blank cells are information too. Take the sheet to your physician or the hospice's admitting nurse, and ask them to correct anything that is wrong. The Start Here page explains how to begin this conversation with the household in mind.