Empower your or your loved one's health journey with information and compassion.
Navigating Healthcare with Confidence
Empower your or your loved one's health journey with information and compassion.
Empowering Your Choices
Patient Advocacy Services
At EducareHome, we are dedicated to patient advocacy, guiding individuals and families through the intricate healthcare maze. Our mission is to inform and empower you and your loved ones to make confident, informed decisions during challenging times and end-of-life.
To ensure that you or your family members receive the best possible care in hospitals, nursing homes and all points of care.
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EducareHome provides patient advocacy services that focus on guiding individuals and families through complex healthcare decisions, particularly during serious illness and end-of-life care. Here's a quick overview of what we provide:
What EducareHome Offers (on a fee-for-service basis)
- Patient Advocacy: Support in navigating healthcare systems, interpreting medical information, and assuring patients and families make informed decisions.
- Palliative Care Guidance: Referrals and Resources for Serious Illness and Pain Management through the Natural Process of End-of-Life Care.
- Private Consultations: Available in hospitals, private settings, or via phone/video, with special attention to cultural and spiritual values.
- Spiritual and Emotional Support: Assistance with emotional and spiritual challenges surrounding illness, pain, legacy planning, death, and bereavement.
- Home Medical Equipment Help: Guidance in the use of necessary home care equipment and digital technologies.
- Assistance with Transfer of Care to home or other care facilities.
- Coordination and follow-up for Nursing Home and Skilled Nursing Patient Care (with reporting of patients' condition and care services to families and other care team members)
Experience
- Over 50 years of clinical and administrative experience, including emergency, critical air transport, acute care, skilled nursing care, palliative care, biomedical ethics, and in-home care.
Philosophical Foundations of Care
Ethics of Care is a relational, whole-family, and context-oriented approach to care.
- Empathy and responsiveness to changing patient and family dynamics
- Relational interdependence through active listening and care planning
- Moral obligations and ethical considerations are rooted in direct human connections and carefully considered clinical practice guidelines
EducareHome Through a Philosophical Lens
Ethics of Care Principles: autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, dignity, inclusivity, and justice
Attentiveness to care plan adjustment as needed
Ongoing personal consultations and emotional support for patients and family
Relational engagement
Ongoing guidance and appropriate referrals during serious illness and end-of-life decisions
Contextual moral reasoning
Navigating complex healthcare choices with spiritual, religious, or secular considerations
Embodied care
Support that includes spiritual, emotional, and physical dimensions
Likely treatment options and outcomes are reviewed with the patient's attending physician (if available) and communicated to the medical staff.
Perceptions as they shift at the Threshold of Death
Optimal Narrative: A patient with terminal cancer arrives at the emergency department in an end-of-life condition seeking relief from shortness of breath. Active listening by the Patient Advocate to the patient and/or family members, as well as hospital staff, prompts important questions surrounding advance directives and contextual circumstances, helping to clarify appropriate care.
Themes:
- Relational perception: Serious illness and dying are experienced not in isolation, but through the presence of another who listens and witnesses.
- Care as interpretation: Emergency and other healthcare staff are empowered to address symptoms with enhanced understanding and existential companionship, in addition to physical care.
Alternate Narrative: A patient with a prior "Do Not Resuscitate" (DNR) is placed on BIPAP in an attempt to relieve shortness of breath. A family member is concerned that the intervention may violate the patients' wishes and is unwilling to inquire further.
Themes:
- Perceptual dissonance: The family member's experience is shaped not only by clinical definitions, but by the felt incongruity between intention and action.
- Care as distortion: Misperceptions often occur without attunement
- Dignity in dying: Well-meaning interventions can fracture the perception of dignity in dying.
- Embodied ambiguity: The BIPAP mask, although appropriate in some instances, may be seen as a symbol of disembodied care due to the interplay between physical experience and conceptual understanding.
Philosophical Reflection
Key Ideas:
- Perception is relational: What we perceive in dying is shaped by who is present, how they respond, and whether they interpret the moment with care.
- Care as epistemology: To care is to know differently—to see dying not as failure, but as transition.
- Curiosity and care intertwined: The curious caregiver asks, "What matters now?"—and in doing so, reshapes the patient's and family's perception of what is unfolding.
We work with individuals and families who need assistance finding and interpreting medical information, navigating computerized technology, managing home medical equipment, or coping with spiritual challenges related to illness, death, and end-of-life care.
Contact Us
Private sessions are available in hospital or private settings.
Private patient and family conferences are available at my home office or via telephone or video.
EducareHome
19 Delaware Street, Cooperstown, New York 13326
14653 Oak Street Magnolia Springs, Alabama 36555 +1.7077759795 timothy@educarehome.com
Hours
As scheduled
Agency Certifications
Fifty years of clinical and administrative experience in emergency, acute care, skilled nursing, and home care training and equipment with special attention to end-of-life issues.
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