In southern Maryland, the professionals at Chesapeake Supportive Care, the palliative care arm of Hospice of the Chesapeake, saw a growing problem.
The company was seeing an ever-increasing number of palliative care referrals for senior citizens living in their homes, who actually needed primary care referrals in addition to palliative care services.
But primary care has been outside the scope of what Chesapeake Supportive Care offers.
“If you are only offering palliative care services, you can’t really do all the primary care, ordering equipment, additional testing, we really don’t have the ability to do that,” said Monica Escalante, the chief strategy and information officer at Hospice of the Chesapeake.
According to Escalante, when patients are discharged from the hospital, the goal is to provide them with a safety net to prevent repeated return visits. That was not as easy without a primary care-palliative care partnership, she said.
“When our practitioners visited their homes, it was evident that they needed a primary care practitioner in the home, that we could palliate the symptoms, but we couldn’t order the regular tests that they needed or other medications or equipment,” she told Palliative Care News. “So, these partnerships were a natural evolution of us becoming aware of these needs, but also taking the time to vet our partners so that we can assess the quality of our partners.”
The problem, Escalante said, is growing. Every day, thousands of people turn 65, and many are now living much longer, creating a steady growth in demand for both palliative and primary care services in the home, she said.
The solution is a partnership with Southern Maryland Housecalls, dividing the provision of care to ensure patients get the services they need, she said. It is the second such partnership, Escalante stated. The first was with On-Site Medical.
“What we are doing with this is we’re linking arms with those practitioners that are visiting housebound patients,” she said.
The need is evident in the numbers. Escalante said her organization received close to 2,000 referrals for palliative care between January and September. Most, 780 referrals, came from hospitals, while 757 came from doctors’ offices, she said. The majority of the referrals are for senior citizens, many of whom no longer drive.
Hospice of the Chesapeake hopes to expand with additional partnerships to cover more patients. The partnerships, Escalante said, make sense because it means Hospice of the Chesapeake can focus on what it does well, palliative care.
“We established these partnerships because it’s better to partner with providers that are already offering these services and support them than to try to come up with that service on our own,” she said.
The latest partnership provides coverage for patients in both Calvert and Prince George, Maryland counties. The partnership with On-Site covers one other county.
Prince George is among the largest counties in the state, and Hospice of the Chesapeake wants to find other care providers to partner with in that area, Escalante said.
“We don’t want to solve all the issues in the world ourselves, but we want to identify people who can help us with that. And definitely, we will be able to do more with more partners,” she told Palliative Care News.
