Empower your or your loved one's health journey with information and compassion.
Navigating Healthcare with Confidence
Empower your or your loved one's health journey with information and compassion.
Empowering Your Choices
Patient Advocacy Services
At EducareHome, we are dedicated to patient advocacy, guiding individuals and families through the intricate healthcare maze. Our mission is to inform and empower you and your loved ones to make confident, informed decisions during challenging times and end-of-life.
To ensure that you or your family members receive the best possible care in hospitals, nursing homes and all points of care.
Realities of Nursing Home and Terminal Care
Watch "If I got Diagnosed with a Terminal Disease" on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FExVCAEZGZA&vl=en
Watch " What do I say to a terminally ill person?"
EduCare Home provides patient advocacy services that guide individuals and families through complex healthcare decisions, particularly during serious illness and end-of-life Care.
What EduCare Home Offers:
- Patient Advocacy: Support in navigating healthcare systems, interpreting medical information, and assuring patients and families make informed decisions.
- Palliative Care Guidance: Referrals and Resources for Serious Illness and Pain Management through the Natural Process of End-of-Life Care.
- Private Consultations: Available in hospitals, private settings, or via phone/video, with special attention to cultural and spiritual values.
- Spiritual and Emotional Support: Assistance with emotional and spiritual challenges surrounding illness, pain, legacy planning, death, and bereavement.
- Home Medical Equipment Help: Guidance in the use of necessary home care equipment and digital technologies.
- Assistance with Planning and Transfer of Care to home or other care facilities.
- Coordination and follow-up for Nursing Home and Skilled Nursing Patient Care (with reporting of patients' condition and care services to families and other care team members)
Experience
- Over 50 years of clinical and administrative experience, including emergency, critical air transport, acute care, skilled nursing care, palliative care, biomedical ethics, and in-home care.
Philosophical Foundations of Care
Ethics of Care is a relational, whole-family, and context-oriented approach to care.
- Empathy and responsiveness to changing patient and family dynamics
- Relational interdependence through active listening and care planning
- Moral obligations and ethical considerations are rooted in direct human connections and carefully considered clinical practice guidelines
Educare Home through a Philosophical Lens
Ethics of Care Principles: autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, dignity, inclusivity, and justice
Attentiveness to care plan adjustment as needed
Ongoing personal consultations and emotional support for patients and family
Relational engagement
Ongoing guidance and appropriate referrals during serious illness and end-of-life decisions
Contextual moral reasoning
Navigating complex healthcare choices with spiritual, religious, or secular considerations
Embodied care
In-person support that includes spiritual, emotional, and physical dimensions
Treatment options and likely outcomes are reviewed with the patient's attending physician (if available) and communicated to the care team.
Shifting Perceptions at the Threshold of Death
Optimal Narrative: A patient with end-stage, terminal cancer arrives at the emergency department in an end-of-life condition seeking relief from shortness of breath. Active listening by the Patient Advocate to the patient and/or family members, in light of current information and discussions with caregiver staff, often prompts important questions surrounding standing orders and advance directives.
Themes:
- Relational perception: Serious illness and treatment options are experienced not in isolation, but through the presence of another who listens and witnesses.
- Care as interpretation: Emergency and other healthcare staff are empowered to address symptoms and treatment with enhanced understanding.
Common Narrative: A patient with end-stage cancer, with a prior "Do Not Resuscitate, Do not intubate (DNR/DNI)" order. A high-pressure breathing mask is placed over the patient's mouth and nose in an attempt to relieve shortness of breath. A family member is concerned that this intervention may cause unnecessary suffering, but is unwilling to inquire about the patient's likelihood of survival or potential quality of life.
Themes:
- Perceptual dissonance: The family member's experience is shaped not only by clinical explanations, but by the felt incongruity between intention and action.
- Care as distortion: Misperceptions about interventions often occur without attempts toward a cofortable understanding of potential long term effects.
- Dignity in dying: Well-meaning interventions can fracture the perception of dignity in dying and an acceptabe quality of life.
- Embodied ambiguity: The pressure mask, although appropriate in some instances, may be seen as a symbol of disembodied care due to the interplay between physical experience and conceptual understanding.
Philosophical Reflection
Key Ideas:
- Perception is relational: What we perceive in dying is mutifactoral, and shaped by who is present, how they respond, and whether they interpret the moment with care.
- Care as epistemology: To care is to know differently—to see dying not as failure, but as transition.
- Curiosity and care intertwined: The empowered caregiver asks, "What matters now?"—and in doing so, allows the patient and family an opportunity to more clearly perceieve of what is unfolding.
We work with individuals and families who need assistance finding and interpreting medical information, navigating computerized technology, managing home medical equipment, or coping with spiritual challenges related to illness, death, and end-of-life care.
Experience
Fifty years of clinical and administrative experience in emergency, acute care, skilled nursing, and home care training and equipment with special attention to end-of-life care issues.
Free Resources
Links to Services
Private sessions are available in hospital or private settings.
Private patient and family conferences are available at my home office or via telephone or video.
EducareHome
14653 Oak Street Magnolia Springs, Alabama 36555 +1.7077759795 tiimbelew@gmail.com
Available as needed upon arrangement.
- Call or text after 8 am and before 5 pm daily at (707)775-9795