Optum Palliative and Hospice Care Norcross, GA

I used Evercare. They were outstanding, prompt, caring, thorough, and very attentive. Any time that the personal care home or I had an issue, they addressed it immediately. Any time we needed anything, they were there, and they even made suggestions of things that we had not thought about that eased my mother's suffering considerably.

My mother was under the care of Evercare Hospice until her passing in late May. For the first 4 months thing were acceptable. The social worker was actually quite good. During the last 2 + weeks of her life, Mom began having a lot of pain and difficulty breathing, including some very serious coughing sessions - some lasting 30 minutes. I tried to get her some relief from the assigned nurse, but to no avail. It was quite painful to watch her suffer and not be able to get relief. On the weekend before she passed, the "weekend nurse" came for a visit. She took one look at Mom and determined that a major change in medication was needed. After conferring with the doctor, a change was ordered and within one hour Mom got relief. If the change had been made 2 weeks earlier, Mom would not have suffered as she did near the end. Mom passed peacefully a few days later without going back into distress. I feel that better care should have been given to prevent the severe discomfort. I would not recommend Evercare.

We are currently using Evercare Hospice and Palliative Care to provide Hospice services to our parent. The initial few months of care were satisfactory, however as we reach the last few weeks of life, the quality of care leaves a lot to be desired. Our parent reached a point last week were they were in a great deal of discomfort. I called numerous times to try to get some comfort for the patient and was met with slow and ineffective results. For 4 days (Tuesday - Friday) our parent suffered great discomfort until the weekend nurse arrived on Saturday morning. Within 45 minutes she had diagnosed the situation, contacted the doctor and made the correct changes to the medications. From that point forward, our parent was finally comfortable. When the regular nurse arrived again on Monday, with only days left in our parent's life, the first thing she said to us was "I see THEY finally got the meds straightened out". This is the nurse that had been assigned to our parent from the beginning! It actually took the weekend nurse to "get the meds straightened out". Our regular nurse appears to be much more concerned with her personal life that with her professional life, as dealing with the needs of her children appear to take precedence over the needs of her patients. Even today, when she arrived to visit our parent, she did not measure any vital signs or even touch our dying parent . She stayed about 15 minutes then said that she had to pick up her child. As we only have days, if not hours left we did not change companies. I would encourage anyone looking for Hospice support to seek a different supplier.

I love Evercare. The staff of Evercare are exceptional. They came with a total package. They have a chaplain, nurses, and have a social worker who comes in. They had more than one resource to come in. They were the first one to teach us how to make things really easier. At first, we were just dealing with this entire thing like an on the job trainee. But when Evercare came in, they taught us how to handle a lot of things. After working with us for 4 months, it was determined that mom was really, really okay. She maintains she isn't bad enough health-wise quite just yet. They do call us periodically to check up on us like a family, but mom is not all the way ready for hospice yet. She actually improved and got better.