Hospice care in Columbia and the Midlands

What is hospice care?

Hospice is comfort-focused care for someone with a life expectancy of six months or less who has chosen to stop curative treatment, delivered by a licensed hospice team wherever the person lives.

DPH's data shows 18 licensed hospice programs with Midlands offices and 1 inpatient hospice house: Lexington Community Hospice House (Lexington, 30 beds).

Who pays for hospice?

Medicare's hospice benefit pays for the team, medications and equipment related to the terminal illness, short inpatient stays and respite, with little or no cost to the patient; it does not pay room and board.

Medicaid and most private insurance also cover hospice. A patient can leave hospice and resume treatment at any time.

How do we choose a hospice in the Midlands?

Ask how quickly the hospice responds at night, how often nurses and aides visit, who covers weekends, where inpatient care happens and what bereavement support it offers.

Check the hospice's DPH license and the counties it serves on our home health and hospice roster.

When should a family call a hospice?

When treatment is no longer working or its burden outweighs its benefit, when hospital stays become frequent, or when a parent says they want comfort first; an informational visit commits no one.

Families often say they wish they had called sooner. Hospice also supports the caregiver, with a social worker, chaplain and volunteers, and it continues bereavement contact with the family for months after a death, which is part of what the Medicare benefit pays for.

Where can hospice care happen in the Midlands?

Wherever your parent lives, at home, in a CRCF or in a nursing home, with short inpatient stays for symptoms that cannot be managed there, and the Midlands' licensed inpatient hospice house is in Lexington.

Many Columbia-area hospice programs are licensed for several counties, so an office downtown may serve a parent in Chapin or Camden. Ask each program whether it already works with your parent's community, which makes coordination of medications and visits smoother, and how it supports the family in the months after a death.

Where is hospice licensed across the Midlands?

This is how DPH's license data spreads hospice across Richland, Lexington, Kershaw, Fairfield, Saluda and Calhoun counties; agencies have no bed count.