Suggestions for care home for my sister in law near Victory Monument

[steve654]

My Sister in Law has stage-4 cancer and since my Wife and I live on the other side of the world, we want to help her family by providing a nice

care home her. Any suggestions, costs etc for something nice near Victory Monument in Bangkok so her family can easily visit her? Somewhere where she would be treated with dignity, food prepared for, maybe a nice garden in house, things like that would be nice.

Edited February 22, 2015 by steve654

[Sheryl]

Unfortunately palliative care in Thailand is very weak and there are no hospices of the type common in the West. "Care homes" are few and far between and mainly for the elderly, and would be very unlikely to provide adequate pain relief. There are a small number of "hospices" for the terminally ill, these treat indigents, give little in the way of narcots (if any) and are pretty gruesome places, not where you would want her.

The best thing to do is to get help into the home. Many hospitals provide home health aides,, or could hire someone privately.

When it reaches the point that she can no longer take oral pain killers (or they are no longer doing the trick), she will need to be admitted to a hospital -- sorry to say but that is how it works in Thailand.

Which hospital is treating her?

[steve654]

Thanks for your reply Have been in contact back and forth and her family is committed to taking care of her at home, which is what we had hoped for but not sure they could

do, so that seems to be the best right now. Thanks for letting us know that there really isn't any good terminally ill care places around as we never knew that. We saw a show here on tv awhile back showing great elderly care in Chiang Mai, but now that I think of it, it was probably for the disabled and elderly with dementia rather than the terminally ill. It looked fantastic with parks and everything else one could wish for and I think it was run by a Swiss group. Hospital treating my wife's sister is the Rajavithi Hospital next to Victory Monument.

[NancyL]

I'm in Chiang Mai and, yes, we have several options for care home for the elderly and disabled. There are now two that are managed by Swiss people, one of which does some promotion and marketing in English. Both are quite nice and luxurious. However, they are not hospice centers, but rather assisted living and dementia care facilities.

For English speaking services, McKean Rehabilitation Center is an older facility, operated by Church of Christ in Thailand that provides nursing home services and also has an assisted living facility that, while very nice is more basic than the the Swiss facilities. It is possible to arrange an end-of-life palliative care admission at McKean Center since there are doctors on staff full-time.

McKean is the only facility that I'm aware of that would be similar to what the OP is describing, not the Swiss facilities.

[Sheryl]

Nancy - how good is the pain management at McKean? Do they have pain management specialists/palliative care specialists?

[steve654]

Nancy, thanks very much for all that info, I really appreciate it

[NancyL]

Nancy - how good is the pain management at McKean? Do they have pain management specialists/palliative care specialists?

Sheryl,

McKean has several physicans on staff, but none are pain management/palliative care specialists. Normally, the doctors and nurses work under the direction of specialists at CM Ram or Sripat hospital, where there are several specialists with western training.

That being said, the staff at McKean are very switched on about pain management and do a good job keeping in touch with the specialists at the full-service hospitals.