Hospice is a special kind of care designed to provide support for individual and their family during the end stages of terminal illness. Hospice care seeks to enable patients to carry on an alert, pain-free life and to manage other symptom so that their end of life journey may be spent with dignity and quality at home or in home-like setting.

Description:
Hospice care is all about how you live. For more than 25 years Hunterdon Hospice, a non-profit organization, has been serving the needs of residents in the county and its contiguous areas. Hunterdon Hospice is comprised of a skilled and compassionate team of professionals and volunteers. The goal of our interdisciplinary team is to meet a patient's end-of-life care goals and support their family through the process, including bereavement. We make it possible for families to live each day to its fullest.

The support and care we offer patients and families is often a relief from the burdens associated with end-of-life care. Families are not left alone during this complex and emotional time. Through an interdisciplinary team approach we can address all aspects of a patients disease and its affect on an entire family unit. We go where the patient is and that means that our care can be delivered in a home, nursing home setting or assisted living center. Hunterdon Hospice is about giving control back to individuals, allowing them to live with dignity, free from physical and emotional pain, focusing on how to make each day the best that it can be.

Through our Speakers Bureau we have committed to ongoing educating to residents to ensure that the people who need our services are aware of what is available through Hunterdon Hospice. Hunterdon Hospice is committed to being a resource for high quality, compassionate end-of-life care in the community that residents can access when needed. Hospice care is truly a choice about how you live.

History:
Hospice care concepts were put in to practice in 1967 at St. Christopher's Hospital in London, in response to the lack of end-of-life care available to patients who were left to die alone. The first hospice program in the United States began serving patients in 1974. Today over 3,100 hospice programs exist in all fifty states, the District of Columbia, Guam and Puerto Rico. Hunterdon Hospice began its journey in 1979 as a result of a study conducted by a group of concerned citizens regarding the lack of end-of-life services to patients in the community. Hunterdon Hospice was formed and a Board of Management was established that year. We also began to recruit staff and volunteers into the organization but remained mostly an all-volunteer organization. In 1981, we accepted our first patients and trained our first group of volunteers. In 1989, Hospice care was approved as part of Medicare. In 1977 Hunterdon Hospice received JACHO accreditation verifying that all appropriate standards for care are organizationally operational. In 2000, NJ began offering licensure to Hospice organizations in the state; and Hunterdon Hospice achieved its NJ State licensure. We continue to offer high quality compassionate care to patients and their families in the community and will continue to address the ever-changing needs of the patients and families that we serve.

Contact person: Joy Stump, Volunteer Coordinator, (phone), (email)
Office fax number: (908) 788-6651

Address:

2100 Wescott Drive Flemington, NJ 08822 (See a map)

Directions:

The office is actually located at 5 Bartles Corner Road. Take 31 N past Hunterdon Medical Center. At the next light is a gas station, make a right onto Bartles Corner Road. Our driveway is the first. . . (more)