Relief & Support from Hospital Sitters
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A hospital sitter can be a great help and relief to a family who needs additional support. When a loved one is in the hospital, it can be difficult to accept that you cannot always be at their side. Work, family, and outside responsibilities continue to press demands upon people no matter what emergencies come up.
Having somebody bedside at the hospital isn’t just a matter of comfort and companionship. It’s another person to help advocate for the patient, to understand and digest the information provided by healthcare professionals, and to expedite the transition from hospital to home.
With Kinkaid Private Care’s hospital sitters, you can ensure that your loved one not only has the company they need – but has a dedicated advocate for their health and wellbeing.
What A Hospital Sitter Does
The primary role of a hospital sitter is to improve patient care and act as a patient advocate. As comprehensive as your loved one’s hospital may be, the simple fact is that nurses, doctors, and other hospital staff typically have dozens of patients to supervise and care for and cannot provide one-on-one attention at all hours of the day.
In contrast, a hospital sitter is dedicated entirely to one patient at a time, providing support, companionship, and assistance with anything the patient may require. This could be as simple as helping a bed-ridden patient adjust themselves for comfort, or as important as tracking symptoms and reporting critical information to hospital staff.
Without a hospital sitter, these responsibilities typically fall to either the patient themselves, or family and friends who have the time and availability to sit with a patient throughout the day. But these solutions don’t always work as well as one would hope – the hospital patient is often wracked with symptoms or under the effects of medications, which can inhibit their ability to communicate their needs effectively, and friends and family often cannot spare the time to sit with their loved one’s long-term.
How a Hospital Sitter Facilitates Care
Kinkaid Private Care’s hospital sitters all have extensive medical backgrounds. This experience provides them with expert insight into several common issues that families and patients alike can experience during a hospital stay, as well as an understanding of how hospital systems function.
This allows them to perform task such as:
- Digesting and explaining complex medical information
- Monitoring symptoms and alerting hospital staff if required
- Advocating for higher or lower levels of care when needed
- Expedite discharge planning when the patient is ready
- Communicating information between patients, providers, and family members
While a hospital sitter does not provide direct medical care, they can play a pivotal role in ensuring that each patient gets the right level of care for their needs.
Who A Hospital Sitter Can Help
Our hospital sitters are trained to help with a wide range of medical concerns that require hospitalization – for both patients and families alike.
Patients
Most people look toward hiring a hospital sitter when a family member or loved one is entered into a hospital’s care for an extended duration. Our hospital sitters can help with a wide range of medical concerns and hospitalization events, including:
- Recovering from surgery
- Mental health hospital admissions
- Post-partum hospital care
- Worsening chronic illness
- Cancer treatment
Hospital sitters are best suited to helping patients with complex medical needs or extended hospitalization events. In these situations, patients not only crave companionship and support, but are often expected to absorb and digest tremendous amounts of medical information and follow-up care regimens.
Family Members
Family members will often fill the role of a hospital sitter when they can, but most people still need to go to work or attend to other outside responsibilities. Even if multiple family members are working together, a hospital sitter can help fill the gaps when nobody else is available.
Hospital sitters support family members by being bedside when medical professionals come to provide essential information, communicating changes in symptoms or concerns to family members, and treating your loved one with the same respect and dignity that they would get from you.
Hospital Staff
A hospital sitter can frequently help hospital staff to make better, more informed decisions about patient care. For example, they can track behavioral or physical symptoms that the patient themselves may not recognize, or communicate to hospital staff about how a patient is responding to certain medications or treatment interventions.
This is always done with the patient’s interest in mind, and only with their informed consent. Your hospital sitter isn’t there to dictate the patient’s actions or to make assumptions, but rather as an advocate who can communicate a patient’s needs and preferences.
Importantly, the role of a hospital sitter isn’t to make nurses and doctor’s jobs easier. In fact, their role is often just the opposite. A hospital sitter instead keeps them accountable, focused, and committed to providing the best level of care available.
How to Choose a Hospital Sitter
Choosing a hospital sitter isn’t always easy. The very nature of being a hospital sitter requires a great degree of trust and compassion, as they are often supporting patients and family members during their most vulnerable and difficult experiences.
When choosing a hospital sitter, there are a few things to keep in mind to make sure you get the right level of care and right sitter for your family’s needs:
- First, discuss with your hospital sitter the scope of care and complexity of health issues. This allows you to know whether your sitter has the experience and availability necessary to provide excellent care.
- Second, make sure that your hospital sitter has a good “fit” with the patient and your family. Much of hospital sitter work is focused on communication and companionship – and having a good relationship is critical to having excellent care.
- Finally, if you find that your sitter isn’t fitting your needs – feel free to reach out to Kinkaid to see if other sitters are available. We want all of our clients to be happy with our services.
Contact us for a FREE consultation today!
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