Capital Caring Health: Help Us Comfort, Care for, and Keep Seriously Ill Patients Safe at Home!

From infants to the very old, Capital Caring Health provides compassionate care and support to patients and families facing serious, advanced illness and the last stages of life. Our mission is to bring comfort and peace during an individual’s time of greatest need, making each day the best it can be. Nearly 98 percent of care is provided in the safety and familiarity of home. 

While the bulk of patients’ healthcare expenses are covered through Medicare, Medicaid, or insurance, many of the additional services we provide—like counseling, grief support, supplemental meals, and more—are possible only through generous contributions from the communities we serve.

Additionally, as one of the nation’s largest, non-profit hospices, no one in need of care is ever turned away for lack of financial resources. Each year, Capital Caring Health provides approximately $3 million worth of charity care to families who have nowhere else to turn, funded, in part, through private support.

Year in and year out, we’ve been able to accomplish all that we do thanks to our strong relationships with the community. Yet in the era of COVID-19, our resources are stretched thinner than ever, with new, unforeseen, and expensive challenges posed by:

• Rising numbers of patients seeking care, especially children
• Reduced access to food and other basic necessities among our patients and families, due to COVID-related job loss
• Higher demand for charity care from the loss of health insurance benefits
• Other unbudgeted costs incurred through:
  • Adapting our in-person, hands-on model of care to one of virtual care and services through new technology  
  • Outfitting clinical care staff with PPEs and other efforts to keep patients, families/caregivers, CCH staff, and volunteers safe

Who We Are and What We Do

Established in 1977, Capital Caring Health (CCH) is the largest, non-profit hospice in the Mid-Atlantic region. With 900 employees and over 2,200 trained volunteers, CCH cares for an average of 2,000 patients each day throughout 10 diverse communities in the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia, adding up to more than 128,000 patients since our start.

Our key services are:

• Hospice Care

Hospice is a specialized type of medical care that provides at-home compassionate physical, emotional, spiritual, and practical support to people in the advanced stage of illness, often near the end of life. A team of doctors, nurses, social workers, other healthcare professionals, and support staff manage pain and other symptoms and assures all needed medications, medical equipment and supplies are in the home. As a result, many critically ill people and their loved ones are better able to focus on what is important to them for a comfortable, dignified quality of life.

• Advanced Illness/Palliative Care

While today’s medical treatments help cancer, heart disease, dementia patients, and others live longer and better lives, they may also come with unwanted and uncomfortable side effects. As with hospice, the focus is on relieving the symptoms, pain, stress, and other burdens of advanced illness, with the goal of improving the quality of life for both patient and family.

• Children’s Hospice and Palliative Care

CCH is one of the oldest and largest providers of pediatric hospice and palliative care in the country, with patients ranging from infants to young adults. Each child receives holistic care focusing on managing pain, distress, and any other physical symptoms. Emotional support and tools—toys, art supplies, music and pet therapy and more–let children be children and forget about their illness for a while.

Our pediatric expertise is enhanced through a partnership with National Children’s Medical Center, one of the country’s leading pediatric hospitals.

• Primary Care Services for Home-limited Seniors 

Chronic health conditions such as high blood pressure and heart disease, diabetes, severe arthritis, and more are frequent in individuals over 65. Without timely and regular medical care to keep them under control, health, quality of life, and independence can quickly decline.

When multiple conditions, disability, or a lack of transportation keeps seniors away from the doctor’s office, Capital Caring Health’s Primary Care at Home brings the doctor to them. Through house calls, mobile technology for diagnostic testing, and 24/7 care coordination, we help seniors maintain their health, avoid the emergency room and hospital, and successfully age in place.

• Veterans’ Health and Support Systems 

Too often, our nation’s veterans experience advanced, life-limiting illnesses without the care, services, and support they have earned. In addition to providing a full range of services—including medical and psychological care for issues common to veterans—CCH works directly with state-level VA offices, accredited agencies, and established veterans’ organizations to secure the benefits and services to which they are entitled. We also match our veteran patients with other veterans or active duty military volunteers to provide companionship and serve as champions to make every day a good one.

• Grief Support

Specially trained health professionals, including grief counselors, social workers and chaplains, help families cope with loss. Whether someone is suffering from the death of a life partner, or from the steady decline of an aged parent with dementia, we offer a variety of individual and family counseling services, support groups, art and music therapy, and more to help work through grief. You don’t have to be a CCH patient to benefit from these services, either. Our grief support services are available to all members of the communities we serve, for up to 12 months after the loss, free of charge.

Help Us Keep Vulnerable Patients Safe at Home, During COVID-19 and Beyond

As the pandemic drags on, Capital Caring Health continues to put our clinical expertise, compassionate approach, and innovation in healthcare delivery and support services to good use, creating a new “normal” that works for the critically ill patients we serve.  

You, too, can have a major impact on the quality of life of a child, a senior, a veteran, or someone else already challenged with advanced illness or the end of life by supporting our efforts now.

Here’s just a sampling of what your gift can do:

• $25 – Feed a hospice patient at risk for food insecurity with a day’s worth of nutritious meals delivered to the home.
• $50 – Help a child play and forget about being sick, through an age-appropriate “toy box” filled with books, games, stuffed animals, and other diversions for our youngest patients.
• $100 – Purchase a tablet to connect a patient to expert medical care, family and friends, music and other forms of therapies, from the safety of home
• $150 – Provide a patient with a simple kit that, in real time, monitors blood pressure, oxygen levels, blood sugar, and other key indicators of health and helps keep them at home and out of the hospital.
• $500 – Fund three days of care for an uninsured or underinsured patient.

With coronavirus-related loss of jobs and insurance coverage reaching record levels, we need your support now more than ever. Help us keep sick children, aging adults, vulnerable veterans and more safe in their homes, regardless of ability to pay, now and in the future.

Support Capital Caring Health through your employee giving program:

As a donor, you can support Capital Caring Health by donating to them through your employer’s workplace giving program (CFC#39664 if you’re a military or federal employee participating in the Combined Federal Campaign). Payroll pledges made through employer-sponsored charitable giving programs represent a cost effective and near effortless way to support your favorite charities.

As Capital Caring Health’s workplace giving partner, America’s Charities can help your company design and implement a program centered on supporting their work – through workplace giving campaigns, employee fundraising, cause-focused signature programs, volunteerism, donation drives, matching gifts, Dollars-for-Doers, In-Kind Giving and other employee engagement and philanthropic initiatives. Click here to request a demo and learn how we can help you do this.