Help Now Healthcare provides palliative and end-of-life care at home across Ontario — personal care, overnight and continuous presence, and nursing visits, delivered alongside the palliative team rather than in place of it.
Call toll-free 1-888-507-6236. If you are calling about someone who has just been given a prognosis, or who is coming home from hospital to die, say so on the call and we will deal with it that day.
Palliative care is not only the last few weeks
A great many families come to this late, because the word is understood to mean dying. Palliative care means care directed at comfort, symptoms and quality of life rather than at cure — and it can run for months or years alongside treatment that is still active. End-of-life care is the last part of it, not the whole of it.
The practical consequence is that most people wait longer than they needed to. If someone is living with a condition that will not be cured, support at home is available to them now, not only at the end.
Who is involved, and where we fit
Palliative care at home is almost always several organizations at once, and families lose a lot of energy working out who does what. This is the usual shape of it.
The people usually around a palliative patient at home
We are one part of this, and not the part that directs the medical care.
The family doctor, nurse practitioner or palliative physician who sets the symptom management plan and writes the orders. Clinical decisions are theirs, not ours.
Ontario’s publicly funded home care, which coordinates palliative nursing and personal support at no cost to the family. Ask about this first — it exists and it is free.
Local hospices, volunteer visiting, bereavement support and residential hospice beds. Availability varies a great deal by community.
The hours the other services do not cover — overnight presence, long daytime blocks, continuous care in the final days, and consistency of the same faces.
What we actually do
| Who | What they do | What they cannot do |
|---|---|---|
| Support workers | Company and presence, meals, light housekeeping, errands, and being in the house so the family can sleep or leave | No hands-on personal care and no clinical tasks |
| Personal Support Workers | Bathing, dressing, mouth care, repositioning and pressure-area care, transfers, toileting and continence care, feeding assistance, medication reminders, and reporting changes | Cannot administer medication, including anything given by injection |
| Registered Nurses and Registered Practical Nurses | Assessment and care planning, medication administration including subcutaneous injections for symptom relief, syringe driver and pump management, wound and skin care, catheter and bowel care, and teaching the family what to watch for | Work to the orders written by the physician or nurse practitioner; do not change the plan on their own |
Nights, and the last few days
Two things drive most of the private hours bought at this stage, and neither is medical.
A family that has not slept properly in a fortnight cannot keep going, and exhaustion is the most common reason a planned death at home ends in an ambulance. Overnight cover is often the single most useful thing we provide.
In the last days, families want someone in the house who has done this before — who knows what changed breathing sounds like, what is normal, and when to call. Continuous care, up to twenty-four hours a day, is arranged for this.
We do not require a long-term commitment for this. If what you need is four nights, book four nights.
The family is part of who we are looking after
Our workers are briefed to expect a household under strain, and to be useful in it without taking it over. That means telling you plainly what is happening rather than being falsely cheerful, keeping the practical parts of the day running so you can spend your time on the person rather than the laundry, and knowing when to be in the room and when not to be.
Our social workers are available where a family wants support in its own right — for anticipatory grief, for the conversations that are difficult to start, and for the disagreements that surface between siblings at exactly the worst moment.
Where we provide it
Across our Ontario service areas — the GTA, Halton and Hamilton, Niagara, Waterloo Region and Wellington, southwestern Ontario, Simcoe, Grey and Bruce, central and eastern Ontario, and the north. See the full list of communities we cover.
Speak to someone today
Tell us where things stand and what the nights look like. We will tell you what we can put in place and when, and what you should be asking Ontario Health atHome for at the same time.
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