JourneyCare provides peace for patients
Q: What is your organization's name?
A: JourneyCare
Q: When and why did the organization start? How has it grown?
A: Three nonprofit hospice care providers, Horizon Hospice & Palliative Care, JourneyCare and Midwest Palliative & Hospice CareCenter, each with more than 30 years of experience serving their communities, combined in 2015 to form one agency, JourneyCare.
Now the largest nonprofit provider of palliative, supportive and end-of-life care in Illinois, JourneyCare serves nearly 3,000 adults and pediatric patients each day, helping them to live fully, with dignity and without pain, on their own terms.
Q: What is its mission?
A: Enriching lives through expert and compassionate care.
Q: How do you work toward accomplishing that goal?
A: Using an interdisciplinary team approach, JourneyCare provides expert pain and symptom management while caring for the whole person - mind, body and spirit - with outstanding clinical care and innovative therapies.
Our team of doctors, nurses, nursing assistants, social workers, chaplains and volunteers are there to support the needs of patients and families, helping them to understand treatment options and coordinate services, based on what matters most to the patient and family.
Q: Who do you serve?
A: JourneyCare provides care and support to patients of all ages and their families throughout 400 communities across 10 counties in the Chicago area and northern Illinois.
Q: How is your agency funded?
A: Reimbursements from Medicare, Medicaid and private insurance. Non-reimbursed services are funded through charitable contributions and grants. No one is ever turned away because of inability to pay.
Q: What kind of successes have you had?
A: In the first year after the merger:
• Cared for 13,000 patients and their families with 900 employees.
• Nearly 1,300 volunteers contributed 54,000 volunteer hours.
• Educated almost 6,000 community members and care professionals who participated in 500 JourneyCare presentations.
• Provided more than $3 million in uncompensated care for those in need.
• All About Kids, JourneyCare's pediatric care program, is the largest program of its kind in Illinois.
• Selected as the only hospice providers in the Chicago area to participate in the Medicare Care Choices pilot program.
Q: What do you wish the community at large knew about the organization?
A. • JourneyCare is not a "place;" 90 percent of the care and support JourneyCare provides is in the patient's home, or wherever they call home.
• Hospice care focuses on improving quality of life through expert pain and symptom management.
• Hospice care is not just for a person's final days or weeks of life. The sooner a patient chooses hospice care after the diagnosis of a serious illness, the sooner this patient and his family can fully benefit from the exceptional care and support of the hospice care team.
• Choosing hospice care is not about "giving up;" it's about living life to the fullest, with dignity and without pain.
• Anyone can call JourneyCare to inquire about care for a loved one. You don't need a doctor's referral
• The care and support JourneyCare provides is customized to support the goals and wishes for the patient and their family members.
Contact information
JourneyCare Foundation Offices: 2050 Claire Court, Glenview; 405 Lake Zurich Road, Barrington; 833 W. Chicago Ave., Chicago
To volunteer: (224) 770-2599 or MMazzaroli@journeycare.org
General information: (847) 467-7423
Referrals for those needing assistance: (224) 770-2489
Website: www.journeycare.org