Respite Volunteering: Four Hours That Save a Caregiver

Of the four main hospice volunteer roles, respite is the one where the volunteer most often hears the words you saved my life. The reason is direct. The patient in a home hospice bed needs round-the-clock attention. The family caregiver, often a 70-year-old spouse or a 50-year-old adult child, has not slept more than three hours in a row for six weeks. Showering becomes a luxury. A trip to the pharmacy feels impossible. A funeral cannot be planned. A respite volunteer who arrives every Tuesday at 9 a.m. and stays until 1 p.m. gives that caregiver four hours of freedom and four hours of recovery. The patient is not alone. The caregiver returns calmer, fed, rested, and able to keep going for another week.

Respite volunteering is different from companion visits because the volunteer often spends part of the shift alone with the patient while the caregiver leaves the home. Some patients sleep through the entire four hours. Some watch television together with the volunteer. Some chat about the grandchildren in their old wedding photos. Some need help eating soft food, drinking through a straw, or repositioning a pillow. The volunteer follows a written care plan left by the hospice nurse and the family caregiver. The plan lists the medications the caregiver has already given, what time the next dose is due, what foods the patient can swallow, what television channels are acceptable, what family stories are okay to discuss, and what topics to avoid. The plan also lists emergency phone numbers and the location of the on-call nurse.

Respite shifts often replace short hospital admissions. Medicare hospice benefits include up to five consecutive days of inpatient respite care, where the patient stays in a hospice facility while the family rests at home. Many families decline that option because the patient is too frail to move or because the family does not want the patient in a strange bed. Volunteer respite shifts in the home fill the same need at a smaller scale. Two four-hour shifts per week add up to 32 hours per month of recovered time for the caregiver. That recovered time keeps families from collapsing in the final weeks of a long illness.

The volunteer who succeeds in respite is one who can quietly take over a household for four hours without disrupting it. The volunteer who struggles is one who tries to clean, reorganize, or change routines. The kitchen looks the way the caregiver left it. The remote control returns to the same spot on the side table. The medications are not touched. The volunteer leaves a short note describing how the patient seemed, any visitors, and any change in breathing or pain. Sources include the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization at nhpco.org, the Family Caregiver Alliance at caregiver.org, AARP at aarp.org, and the Hospice Foundation of America at hospicefoundation.org.