New Program Will Help Restore Home Care Services For Terminally Ill Children

A new partnership among local agencies will allow home health care for terminally ill children to continue. This comes after Hospice and Palliative Care of Greensboro announced it would stop these services at the end of November.

Cone Health will lead the effort, which includes a new clinic to treat seriously ill children.

“That also means that our staff and the providers who will function there will be the central contact for each family and we will design a personalized care plan for each child and each family and make sure that our community partnerships deliver a very high level of care,” says Dr. Elizabeth Golding, medical director of palliative care at Cone Health.

The hospital says it has been growing its pediatric palliative care operations over the past several months and it stepped up to meet the community need after the cuts were made.

Cone Health is collaborating with Advanced Home Care, which will provide in-home services. Hospice and Palliative Care of Greensboro will also be involved.

Dania Ermentrout's five-year-old daughter Moira suffers from a rare, life threatening disease. She's been an advocate for other parents who are struggling to find the help that they need. Ermentrout says she's upset with the way some of the organizations involved have handled the change in services. But she's relieved they'll continue.

“Our daily lives are complicated and filled with a lot of uncertainty and pain already and that kind of service is monumental. I would like to know why. Why did we have to be put through that surprise discharge in the first place?”

Hospice and Palliative Care of Greensboro said it had to end its home care services last month because they are difficult to sustain when the volume of patients is small and the geographic care area is large.

Cone Health says the new pediatric palliative care clinic will open in the coming weeks and home services are available now for families to access.

“This is a really vulnerable population and this is a population who really needs our services," says Dr. Golding. "This is really the ideal for all of health care. Pediatrics requires a special sensitivity, really an expert level of communication, and I think this system will be a model for people who have complex illnesses across the lifespan.”

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