At-Home Hospice

At-Home Hospice Ottawa

About Us

Mission

To provide personal and compassionate, home-based care for clients coping with health challenges, advanced illnesses and end of life.

Vision

To provide education and training for our palliative care providers – our team members and others – so no one in Eastern Ontario facing illness or end of life goes without home-based care.

Values

We respect individual wishes to receive care and comfort in their homes. Our services incorporate the underlying principles and philosophy of the community palliative care program and these are the focus of our operation.

These core components include care that is:

  • client-centered
  • positive and supportive
  • respectful of individual beliefs and relationships
  • directed towards enhancement of personal comfort and quality of life
  • delivered with dignity and respect

Carol Seaby has practiced nursing in the Ottawa area for over four decades, working in hospitals, community nursing agencies, family physicians’ offices, teaching capacities, and the Hospice at May Court. Throughout her nursing career, she has often heard from patients who felt that the best place to be cared for was in their own home.

Carol kept this thought in her mind when she traveled to Uganda in the summer of 2004 with CANHAVE, a charitable organization that supports and provides educational opportunities for AIDS orphans. While attending a conference on palliative care, she learned about hospice Africa’s framework for busing health professionals out to the villages, which allowed necessary hospice care to be brought to the bedsides, cots, or mats where villagers lived. Just like the patients she’d seen in Ottawa, the people of Uganda preferred to receive healthcare in the comfort of their own homes.

It was this inspiration that led Carol to create At-Home Hospice shortly after returning to Canada. Traditionally, hospices offered hospitality and a place to stay for travellers and pilgrims in all stages of health, including the sick, wounded, and dying. With At-Home Hospice, Carol expanded this notion into a full philosophy of care.