Hospice care work is incredibly important. When people are dealing with the final years or months of their lives, they need a caring healthcare worker that can keep them as comfortable and healthy as possible in the time they have left. If you want to succeed in this career field, you’ll need these ten skills that are essential for hospice care workers:
1. Flexibility
Hospice care is demanding, even though you’ll frequently be working one-on-one with patients. After all, hospice patients can have a healthcare emergency at any time, so you’ll need to be ready to jump into action at any time. The flexibility that’s demanded of hospice care workers is key to the profession. Thankfully, finding work as a hospice care worker is often easier than other specialized medical careers.
2. Compassion
As a hospice care worker, you’ll be dealing with people who are preparing for the end of their lives. If you lack compassion, you’ll be harming your patients on a mental (and physical) level. Hospice care patients deserve medical workers who truly care about their comfort in the last years of their lives. Those who enter this field will need a high level of compassion from becoming emotionally burnt out by the demands of this unique and important career.
3. Patience
Since you’ll be dealing with a lot of patients who are dealing with painful and immobilizing health conditions, you’ll need a lot of patience to take care of them in a proper, effective, and compassionate manner. You’ll need to take your time and avoid pushing patients too far when providing care. Otherwise, you’ll have a hard time gaining a reputation as an effective and valuable hospice care worker.
4. Observance
Hospice care workers are the front line of medical protection and care for hospice patients. For this reason, they need to stay observant of their patient’s physical and mental conditions. If hospice care workers fail to do so, they could miss the windows needed to take care of a patient’s ills. Your hospice care patients deserve the best, and you’ll need to be hyper-observant on every shift you work to give them the best.
5. Stamina
Despite the seemingly more laid-back and slow-paced nature of hospice care work, it’s still a highly demanding job (physically, mentally, and emotionally). To ensure you can do the work effectively, you’ll need to keep your mental and physical stamina levels at a reasonable level. Otherwise, you’ll feel more burnt out day to day, and you’ll have a harder time finding job satisfaction.
6. Awareness
In addition to being observant, you’ll need to have an awareness surrounding the social intricacies of the position you’re taking on as a hospice worker. Since you’re dealing with patients who are preparing for the end, you’ll be dealing with more intimate interactions with them. Being culturally sensitive and aware will ensure you can do so in a respectful and medically effective fashion.
7. Personality
Your ability to interact with patients in a pleasant and inspiring manner is key to being a quality hospice care worker. Even if you have to be artificial about it, you need to have a warm and welcoming personality when doing your hospice care shifts. Otherwise, you’ll have a hard time gaining new clients in the future. To have a stable career, you need to take this quality/skill seriously.
8. Initiative
Hospice care work is often more self-guided than other medical work. You’ll be working alone in many cases, so you need to rely on your own initiative and professional drive to get work tasks done. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself drowning in work, and delayed healthcare can significantly impact your hospice care patients’ lives. To be a solid hospice care worker, you’ll need a passion for the job that will keep you focused, professional, and effective at all times.
9. Professionalism
Staying professional is key to hospice care work. Even though you’ll likely form a more intimate connection with your hospice care patients, you need to ensure you never cross emotional lines, and that you maintain your position as a healthcare provider above all else. If you fail to do so, the job can get unwieldy, and it will be much harder to perform your job ethically.
10. Empathy
Having empathy may seem similar to having compassion, but the two are distinct from one another. Being empathetic will not only help you treat your patients with dignity, but it will help you feel more secure in your job as well. After all, being a hospice care worker is an incredibly emotionally demanding job.
