Hospice of SC Honors Volunteers Disco-style!

In recognition of National Volunteer Week, Hospice of Santa Cruz County honored its volunteers at Holy Cross Parish Hall on Thursday, April 19. The event also celebrated the organization’s 40 years of care and service to the community. Volunteers were transported back to 1978, when the organization started, with a disco-themed celebration.

This honoring of the 250+ volunteers is fitting. Hospice of Santa Cruz County was started in 1978 by a few caring volunteers who happened to be young mothers who were also nurses and caring was part of their DNA.

When they saw a local family struggling with cancer and learned that the young father wanted to remain at home with his family at the end of his life, they asked themselves how they could help to make that happen.

As these three nurses started helping people live and die at home, another group of volunteers formed in our community. This group saw that seriously ill people had unique needs, and they began reaching out to provide emotional support, shopping and running errands for people they didn’t even know — they just knew their community needed support. They began helping families to cope with their grief and loss.

When these two groups of volunteers learned about each other, they realized they could be more effective together and joined forces to become Hospice Caring Project. Thirty years later, in 2008, the Board of Directors suggested that the organization was no longer a project, but a vital community service and the name was changed to Hospice of Santa Cruz County.

Today, Hospice of Santa Cruz County provides hospice, transitional care and palliative care services to over 250 patients and their families each day and supports hundreds of hospice families and community members through their grief.

Volunteers are an essential part of the program and serve in many different capacities:

• Trained Volunteer Visitors provided 3,768 visits to patients and families last year.
• Volunteer Visitors, more than twice the Medicare requirement and national average of 5%, conducted 11% of all Hospice visits.
• The Pre-Med Volunteer Visitor program, a collaboration with USCS, received the California Hospice and Palliative Care Association Outstanding Program Achievement Award in 2017.
• The organization’s pet companion volunteer visitors made 612 visits to patients and families last year.
• Grief support volunteers provided 1455 grief support sessions to hospice families and grieving community members
• Volunteers also helped to support 60 children last year at Camp Erin, an annual camp for grieving children
• Outreach volunteers help community members complete Advance Healthcare directives and support educational movie nights and death cafes
• The Friends of Hospice volunteer group present events and raise funds for the organization
• Volunteers serve on the Board of Directors and various committees

“We are incredibly fortunate to have such a thriving volunteer program,” said CEO Michael Milward, “Our volunteers are our greatest advocates. They understand the power of what hospice can do for families as they navigate all that comes at the end of a life and they share our vision that all people in this community can live and die with dignity,” he explained.