Conversation Ready on WIHI

Madge Kaplan writes:

The next WIHI broadcast — Who’s Conversation Ready? How Health Care Can Respect End-of-Life Wishes — will take place on Thursday, October 24, from 2 to 3 PM ET, and I hope you'll tune in.

Our guests will include:

• Kelly McCutcheon Adams, LICSW, Director, Institute for Healthcare Improvement
• Lauge Sokol-Hessner, MD, Attending Physician, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC)
• Kate Lally, MD, Medical Director of Palliative Care, Kent Hospital and Medical Director, VNA of Care New England
• Donna Smith, MD, Virginia Mason Hospital

For over a year, building on others’ great work, IHI has been engaged in two groundbreaking initiatives to reduce the confusion and improve the circumstances that surround end-of-life care for most Americans in the US. The Conversation Project, founded in collaboration with IHI, is a grassroots effort to encourage and enable every one of us to discuss our wishes regarding end-of-life care with our friends and loved ones, long before there’s a medical crisis. The second initiative, Conversation Ready, is designed to capture the ways in which health care organizations can effectively respect and respond to these wishes. Ten organizations have been working with IHI to share and refine their best practices, and we’re going to check in on what they’ve learned on the October 24 WIHI: Who’s Conversation Ready? How Health Care Can Respect End-of-Life Wishes.

Three clinical leaders from notable health care systems will be on hand for this WIHI, along with IHI’s Kelly McCutheon Adams. You’ll hear about an effort underway at BIDMC to embed a system of “4 Rs” into all patient engagements: Reaching out to learn a patient’s end-of-life preferences and values, followed by processes to Record and reliably Retrieve and Respect the information. Care New England has a number of innovations underway, including the designation of a “conversation nurse” who ensures that the goals of patients and families stay at the forefront of all end-of-life decision making. At Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle, the electronic medical record is becoming an effective home base for important and visible information about preferences regarding end-of-life care.

This is just a taste of what’s ahead on the October 24 WIHI. Host Madge Kaplan and her guests are also eager to find out what’s going on at your organizations. There’s been considerable progress with palliative care in many, many hospitals. But the end-of-life conversation that starts at home among friends and family and then continues straight through to the clinical world, without running into a lot of roadblocks, isn’t yet the norm. That’s what we’re all working on. 

I hope you'll join us! You can enroll for the broadcast here.