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The room number is 4413. The table and chairs are dark brown, the sleeper sofa is lime green, and hand-painted palm trees and butterflies are scattered in colorful clusters on the earth tone walls.
It’s not an apartment or a nicely furnished hotel room, but Leonard J. Chabert Regional Medical Center (LJCMC) Palliative Care Program’s new suite, located on the fourth floor Medicine Unit. The suite was officially opened at Thursday’s ribbon-cutting ceremony.
“The opening of the suite complements the efforts of the LJCMC Palliative Care Program, which has been serving patients since 2008,” Rhonda Green, LJCMC CEO said in a press release.
The program, Green said, is a quality-based standard of care for end-of-life patients, providing care for all of the patient’s needs. It also treats pain, symptoms and stress of illness, to help improve the quality of life.
“The wheels have been turning for this for a long time, and in the end of 2007 things started really making sense for me as far as expectations for myself,” said Dr. Andrea Espinoza, who is part of the LJCMC Palliative Care Program.
Espinoza said she had a patient who died very young, and remembered her always asking to be with her family, including her little boy, Cayman.
“She was a very sweet lady, and she had a baby that was 2 years old, and there weren’t many differences that I could see between her life and my life,” Espinoza said. “It never sat well with me that all she kept asking me was to go home for the weekend.”
Espinoza’s patient passed away in the Intensive Care Unit in 2007, and it sparked a concern for the doctor.
“Why can’t her family be with her and stay in the room as she dies?” she asked.
So in an effort to make the hospital feel like home, Cayman’s Room was put into work.
“It’s a reminder every day of the struggle that she eventually had lost,” Espinoza said.
The Palliative Care team, lead in part by Linda Steck, RN Critical Care Supervisor, meets regularly to review clinical data and ensure quality of care given, and even follow up with grieving families by giving them personalized sympathy cards.
“Being in the ICU for 30 years I’ve seen patients get futile care, and suffer needlessly, and that’s why we really wanted to push the initiative for palliative care,” said Steck, who noted LJCMC is the only hospital in Terrebonne Parish and the only one of the state charity hospitals with a palliative care room and committee.
“The ultimate goal is to have a whole separate ward with several rooms for patients, but we have limited space right now in the hospital,” Steck said.
Room 4413 was furnished with money given from an anonymous donor, and is complete with a stereo system above the bed for the patient to listen to music, too.
“We can’t cure these people, but we want to try to make the rest of their life as comfortable as possible to do the things they didn’t get to do, kind of like a bucket list,” Steck said.
Dr. Lee Arcement, Linda Steck, Dr. Andrea Espinoza and CEO Rhonda Green stand outside LJCMC’s new palliative suite on the fourth floor. A commemorative plaque for those who lost their lives in the hospital hangs next to the door. JENNA FARMER
