Hospice home care jobs ?

VU RN BSN · Jan 6, 2009

Hi Rascal,

When I worked as a home hospice nurse, my job title was a "Primary Care Nurse", or PCN. I was both the case manager and the patient care nurse who made home visits.

We were given caseloads of 15-20 hospice patients. We made visits to these patient's homes in order to do nursing evaluations and assessments, do patient and family teaching / education, perform nursing care such as inserting Foley catheters, manage and re-fill med prescriptions and many other duties. The case management work involved A LOT of paperwork and many phone calls. In hospice, you work together with your co-workers as part of an "interdisciplinary team" or IDT. Once a week, we all got together at the hospice office and had an IDT meeting, with all the PCNs (nurses), CNAs (aides), Patient Family Counselor (Social Worker), Chaplain (pastor), Clinical Team Leader (nurse manager) and our hospice ARNP (nurse practitioner) and hospice physician. We would discuss the care of all our hospice patients on our team and we would do our care plans together. Our hospice physician relied on us PCNs to give detailed reports on whether our patients were improving or declining and whether our patients were still hospice appropriate or needed to be evaluated for discharge from hospice (yep, some patients graduate from hospice alive). Obviously, with hospice, we saw and cared for many people who were actively dying at home.