When you donate to the SSM Hospice & Home Care Foundation, you are helping patients and families in your community. These funds are used to help in-need patients with the purchase of items not covered by insurance. Your donations are also used to help caregivers who may have had to stop working to care for a loved one in hospice.

Let’s take a look at some of the ways the Northwest Missouri Foundation made use of funds raised in 2005: According to Elda Jones, Hospice Volunteer Coordinator for Northwest Missouri, donations helped a great many people. In the past year, donations paid for patients’ utility bills, bed sheets, rental for two high-tech airflow mattresses to help with special-needs patients, pill boxes for hospice and home care patients, “Ensure” liquid supplements for patients on tube feedings, and dressings for patients' wounds.

All hospice offices in the SSM Healthcare network offer a holiday remembering ceremony for bereaved families. It is a very important event to many who are grieving. Funds raised from memorials help provide simple refreshments of punch and cookies after the ceremony.

Hospice donations also help provide resource materials for grieving family members including the book “Gone From My Sight,” by Barbara Karnes and booklets on Advance Directives and Durable Powers of Attorney. Donations were used to provide community and staff training as well as continuing education for other hospice professionals within the region.