By Boyana Peeva
VALDOSTA — The team at Serenity Palliative and Hospice Care is on a mission to provide holistic health care to patients in a peaceful, comfortable and dignified manner.
Serenity Palliative and Hospice Care began serving Valdosta and the surrounding areas in April as a branch of Atlanta Metropolitan Hospice.
It consists of an administrator, assistant administrator, chaplain, social worker, certified nursing assistant and an office manager. Their specialty is palliative and hospice care, serving the patients’ physical conditions and spiritual needs.
“With hospice care, the patient has been diagnosed with six or less months of life, while with palliative care it’s indefinite time,” Dale Frier, assistant administrator, explained.
Serenity attracted Frier to become part of the team because when his mother was dying, the nurses eased her emotional and physical pain and made their last moments together a positive experience. Frier was then determined to do the same for other people who are in a very critical phase of their lives.
Ebony Scruggs, administrator, joined Serenity because she believes it’s important to educate others about the death process. She said patients should perceive death as a natural continuum and it does not have to be the worst experience for them.
Yolanda Payne, chaplain at Serenity, resigned from being a hospital chaplain a couple of months ago.
“Hospice here was giving me a strong call to take care of the patient,” she said.
“To me hospice is a ministry, a job I do daily, and I feel like I’ve been called to give spiritual guidance and support to the terminally ill.”
Serenity specializes in pain management for the terminally ill, and according to Frier, “50 percent of our clients got better and got off hospice.”
The hospice office is located at 1205 Baytree Road, Suite 5.
For more information, call (229) 241-8338, send a fax to (229) 241-8353 or e-mail serenityphc@gmail.com. It is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday and has a person on call 24/7.
Q: Do you provide any other services at Serenity?
A: Frier: Here at Hospice, a lot of things that are available to people that they are unaware of that help their needs that other programs can't. For example, when we pick up a patient and let's say they need oxygen, we pay for it, and we pay for the pain medicine. A lot of services come under our umbrella.
Q: Who else is part of the Serenity team?
A: Frier: Traci Carr is our social worker, Shanika Morris is our certified nursing assistant, and Tierra Deberry is the office manager. We also have two doctors on staff. Dennis Thomas is the medical director, and Alberto Garcia is the assistant medical director.
Q: What is unique about your service?
A: Payne: It’s more of a holistic approach, we are going on a spiritual level, and we actually connect the being to the process.
Scruggs: We develop a relationship with the family and we are like friends. We put more into it than just a job. I would call it a ministry.
Frier: We are a small group and provide more personalized service, and the home office allows us more leeway to provide individual and personalized attention within our scope.
