EP 153 – What is Hospice Care & Its Power With Beth Cavenaugh

EP 153 – What is Hospice Care & Its Power With Beth Cavenaugh

EP 153 – What is Hospice Care & Its Power With Beth Cavenaugh

Life is nothing but a fleeting moment which is why we must cherish the people we love until the end. Taking care of a sick or dying loved one can be harrowing. This situation is also the reason why some opt for hospice care. 

Hospice care is a special kind of patient care that focuses on the quality of life for people and their caregivers experiencing an advanced, life-limiting illness.

It provides compassionate care for those in the last phases of an incurable disease so they can enjoy their last days comfortably and as much as possible. 

In this episode, we are joined by Beth Cavenaugh, a nurse with twenty-five years of experience in internal medicine.

She also had experience in short-stay surgery and hospice care. Through this experience, she first understood that compassion in health care could sometimes be elusive. 

Besides nursing, she is also the author of The Power and Pain of Nursing, where she talks about arming both new and seasoned nurses to use the tools necessary to care for themselves. 

Hospice care is one of the most demanding professions in the world. Not only is it demanding, but nurses go through the end-of-life process and emotions involved in grieving.

It is also the reason why compassion is a must among nurses. 

Join us as we cover these topics and learn how to be more compassionate as nurses to those who need it most. 

Question for Our Guest

The questions below are some we’d like to tackle. We go off-topic all the time so we don’t expect to hit them all. If you have any ideas, please let us know. Looking forward to our conversation!

  1. Can you give us a background about yourself and your nursing experience?
  2. How do we empower our nurses in the workplace or hospice?
  3. What are some of the internal struggles of hospice nurses or just nurses that do a lot of end-of-life care? What was always on your mind when you were in the hospice setting?
    – In the ICU, the main struggles are keeping numbers within a certain range. Sometimes a person’s vitals can drastically decline within minutes requiring us to troubleshoot the issue, and having that in the back of our mind is constant stress. You just don’t know what will happen even though you already have a composed list of solutions. 
  4. How can we boost compassion in the healthcare profession?
  5. We were taught medicine well, but how do you bridge the gap in self-care for ourselves and heal the healer? 
  6. What are your top ways to bolster mental health and prevent burnout?
  7. Many nurses that we’ve talked to say that it is hard for them to switch gears from work to home; how can nurses learn to “leave the baggage” at the workplace?
  8. What is a beautiful death? What has to be met for the patient’s needs? 
  9. Some nurses struggle with communicating with people reaching the end of life; what are some good conversations to have or topics to discuss?

Learn about hospice care in our latest episode. Click here for more 👇

For the latest news and updates, you can follow Beth on her Twitter 👉👉👉 @beth_cavanaugh or visit her website https://www.bethcavenaugh.com/ for more! You can also check out her books The Power & Pain of Nursing and Some Light at the End on Amazon.com.

TIMESTAMPS:

0:00 – Intro
0:47 – Plugs
2:05 – Episode Introduction
2:39 – About Beth Cavenaugh
5:32 – The day-to-day life of a Hospice Nurse
9:04 – Empowering Nurses in the workplace
12:13 – Compassionate Care leads to better patient outcome
13:29 – The Importance of Good Leaders in the Workplace
14:36 – The Struggles of Being a Nurse
16:10 – Beth on separating life and work
19:42 – How can we boost compassion in the healthcare profession?
20:52 – How a nurse’s mood impacts a patients
23:04 – Beliefs about Death
25:46 – Dealing with a patient’s death
28:36 – Making the best days of a dying patient
33:36 – Things you can do to heal yourself
38:18 – What makes Beth busy