Breede River Hospice 1288 views

Breede River Hospice focuses on providing Palliative Care to terminally ill patients and has grown to now offer a range of life-giving and supporting services that, these days, go far beyond what hospice is traditionally known for.

Serving the entire Langeberg sub-district, the Breede River Hospice is a well loved and respected beacon of hope and healing to all those living within the beautiful Breede Valley Winelands region.Snce 1999, we have uplifted the lives of many people of all ages, colours and cultures living within the towns and townships of Robertson, Nkqubela, Bonnievale, Ashton, Zolani, Montagu and McGregor and our entire surrounding farmland - an area of over 4 500 km2In our belief that everyone has a right to quality care, we deliver our essential care-giving services entirely for free!While our primary focus remains providing Palliative Care to terminally ill patients, we have grown to now offer a range of life-giving and supporting services that, these days, go far beyond what hospice is traditionally known for.  In our mission to provide wider ranging and more effective health care and disease prevention services, we work closely in collaboration with the Department of Health Western Cape in ensuring their Integrated Home and Community Based Care (HCBC) objectives are met.PatientCareTeamTuberculosis (TB) has now become one of the primary killers in our country - followed by HIV/AIDS, cancer and other chronic diseases.  Many of our patients have been afflicted with these diseases and we go the extra distance by doing all we can to prolong life and rescue patients from facing unnecessarily premature death.We take it upon ourselves to empower our patients (and their families) to live life and have hope for the future in the face of being told “there is nothing more we can do for you”.   We know there is so much we can offer them in our belief that everyone has the right to die pain-free and with dignity at home - and that their loved ones will receive the necessary support to allow them to do so.Our holistic, total care package is tailor made for each patient.  No family is the same and nobody is judged by their social standing.  In the face of a life-threatening illness, we see the patient as head of the team, with the supporting team comprising a professional nurse, doctor, social worker and care-worker all working together to ensure every aspect of the patient's life is addressed - be it physical, emotional, spiritual, cultural or social.  After a patient has reached life's end, we provide a year's bereavement counselling to the family members affected, supporting them through their grief and mourning time.  We care deeply for our children, too... being the only local community organisation providing highly specialised paediatric palliative care to those unfortunate kids who come to face their death all too soon.HPCALogo We are one of the top 23 esteemed member hospices of the Hospice Palliative Care Association of SA (HPCA) to have been awarded a 5-Star HPCA Certification together with a 3-Year COHSASA (Council of Health Services Accreditation of South Africa) Accreditation - Please see below..We are a recognised Palliative and Health Care Training Centre providing Certified HPCA and HWSETA Care-Worker Training Courses to Dept. of Health workers, old age homes, community volunteers and other health facilities. Through these training courses, we train health-care workers to uplift their own communities... - not only in patient care and family support but also in the prevention and proper treatment of potentially terminal illnesses such as HIV/Aids, Tuberculosis, Diabetes and Cancer. Our interventions with patients and family members alike total more than 470 per month and, at any given time, we are touching the lives of +/- 1 500 people.  These numbers grow exponentially year on year.Making our free care-giving services available to 105 000 people in Langeberg comes at a huge expense and we depend entirely upon grants, donations, fund-raising events and our hospice shops to continue providing the live-supporting services we offer.