November 11, 2009
Expanded Pet Therapy Program Will Comfort the Dying and Their Families
ThedaCare’s hospice volunteer roster will soon include names like Spot and Rover thanks to an expanding pet therapy program at Community Hospice at Cherry Meadows, within ThedaCare’s Peabody Manor. The initiative, funded by ThedaCare’s Community Hospice Foundation and a grant from the Hospice Organization and Palliative Experts (HOPE) of Wisconsin, will bring specially trained dogs to the bedsides of hospice patients to offer physical, emotional and spiritual care.
“It’s incredible the difference a dog can make,” said hospice volunteer coordinator Mary Betters. “It’s an amazingly useful thing to add to the lives of hospice patients and their families.”
Betters oversees 140 ThedaCare hospice volunteers. Among them is Molly Johnson, owner of Canine Comfort, a dog therapy program development business. Johnson began volunteering at Cherry Meadows with her dogs Beamish, Dudley and Madigan a year and a half ago because, she said, “I needed to get my hospice fix.”
It’s a fix she has sought since she was 14, when her father died alone in his hospital room. The experience motivated her to comfort other families facing terminal illness, which she does with canine assistance.
“Dogs are great objective listeners who don’t try to fix things,” Johnson said. “Whether the hospice patient is 20 or 90, they have a great need to review and remember the life they had, and the presence of the dog really elicits that. It’s not what the dog does, it’s what happens when the dog is there.”
Betters agrees. “Sometimes a dog triggers memories of a patient’s own pets. That dog comes in so unconditionally. It’s so non-threatening. It lowers blood pressure and is physically soothing. We see patients who haven’t responded to human interaction who will reach right out to pet the dogs when they visit.”
After volunteering with hospice patients informally, Johnson worked with Betters to submit a pet therapy grant proposal to HOPE of Wisconsin, which granted $800 to support the program. Then Johnson presented pet therapy program goals, objectives, policies and procedures to the Community Hospice Foundation, which will cover training costs for teams of therapy dogs and their volunteer handlers.
“Many of our hospice volunteers are going to be part of the program,” Betters said.
Those volunteers’ dogs will go through extensive training before they interact with patients. “These dogs are thoroughly tested in several areas,” Betters said. “They go through more testing than our human volunteers do.”
That’s because they have such an important job to do. “The dogs provide a little bit of entertainment, and they’re a great distraction from what the patient is feeling, whether it’s physical pain, emotional pain or spiritual pain,” Johnson said. “They also provide an often isolated patient a wonderful connection to the outside world.”
Hospice patients in any setting can benefit from such attention, which is why Betters hopes to see the program grow from Cherry Meadows to other hospice facilities and eventually into home hospice care. Said Betters, “We’re anxious to get started.”
Cherry Meadows is a 10-bed residential hospice within Peabody Manor that provides symptom management and support to hospice patients in a peaceful, home-like setting. Cherry Meadows has been a part of ThedaCare At Home’s hospice program since 2001. The Community Hospice Foundation, Inc. raises and responsibly manages charitable contributions to support compassionate end-of-life care for ThedaCare At Home hospice patients and families.
ThedaCare (www.thedacare.org) is a community-owned health system consisting of Appleton Medical Center, Theda Clark Medical Center, New London Family Medical Center, Riverside Medical Center, ThedaCare Physicians, and other health care services. ThedaCare is the largest employer in Northeast Wisconsin with nearly 5,400 employees.
For more information, media may contact Megan Wilcox (megan.wilcox@thedacare.org), corporate and public relations specialist for ThedaCare, at (920) 830-5847, or pager (920) 554-0730.