History
Our Beginning
LightBridge Hospice was founded in 2003 by Jill Mendlen, a Registered Nurse who has devoted her career to the delivery of quality healthcare. She, her partners and an amazing team who joined them had spent most of their professional lives building companies and creating innovative programs to provide unique, individualized quality care to those most frail, clinically compromised and vulnerable patients living with chronic and complex conditions and diseases.
They saw the creation of LightBridge as the perfect culmination to that work and crowning jewel in the continuum of healthcare services. They made the decision to pursue accreditation by the Joint Commission from inception to make a statement about their commitment to quality.
Mission and Values
Periodically, through the years that we’ve served the citizens of San Diego county, we have revisited our mission statement. Each time, we agree that it still conveys the spirit and heart that was the genesis of LightBridge.
The LightBridge Hospice MISSION is to assist our patients to move through the last stages of their life with grace, strength, and hope. We value the creation of an atmosphere of comfort and dignity in which our patients can, along with their loved ones and care givers, grieve for that which is lost, celebrate what has brought joy and come to a sense of peace about whatever the future holds.
Our strategy for achieving our mission is essentially two pronged. First, we strive to successfully maximize the physical comfort of our patients and minimize the impact of their symptoms. We seek to bring emotional comfort and support to the patient, their family and caregivers, during the last stages of life. We also provide continued bereavement support to family and caregivers following the loss of their loved one.
Our Name
People often ask us about the origin of our name. We did not arrive at it easily. For weeks, we brainstormed ideas for the name and did “trial runs” with our families and friends with nothing that felt right … until that day when Jill said “This is it; we have to decide on a name this week.” That pressure led to a deep and thoughtful conversation about what we wanted our name to convey.
The hospice journey is a time of transition for patients and their families. We chose the BRIDGE to represent that transition from the life that our patients have known to the LIGHT that beckons from the other side of the BRIDGE. Many people talk about moving toward LIGHT during this transition and we also knew our goal was to shed LIGHT along the way, across this BRIDGE, for our patients and their families. We still ran it past our friends and families but we knew LightBridge was the name that perfectly conveyed our heart and our mission.
Our “DNA”
Our Goals
In keeping with our mission and values, we are committed to achieving the following goals:
- Employing and nurturing a team of health, psychosocial and spiritual care professionals who are dedicated to providing high quality care and services with compassion and respect.
- Providing care which deals effectively with the symptoms associated with the end stages of life and which threaten to rob the patient of the opportunity to face death with comfort and dignity.
- Honoring the right of the patient and their loved ones to make decisions regarding their care within the framework of the hospice model.
- Collaborating respectfully and productively with primary care physicians, hospital and nursing facility staff and the other healthcare professionals who are involved in the care of our patients.
- Incorporating our Quality Assurance/Process Improvement process into every aspect of our operation so that we continually identify and implement new opportunities for improving care and services.
- Devoting resources to increase community awareness and acceptance of the hospice concept.
- Admitting patients based on established admission criteria without regard to race, religion, national origin, ancestry, mental or physical handicap, marital status, sex, sexual orientation or ability to pay.
