Partners in Palliative Care, a program supported by Providence Hospice & Home Care of Snohomish County, works in partnership with various clinics striving to improve the quality of life of our community members. The program offers professional, compassionate, and quality care in appropriate settings by empowering individuals and families to manage life threatening illnesses and direct end-of-life care.

Description:
The goal of palliative care is to prevent and relieve suffering and to support the best possibility of life for patients and their families, regardless of the stage of the disease or the need for other therapies. Palliative care is both a philosophy of care and an organized, structured system for delivering care. Palliative care expands traditional disease-model medical treatments to include the goals of enhancing quality of life for patient and family, optimizing function, helping with decision-making and providing opportunities for personal growth. As such, it can be delivered concurrently with life-prolonging care or as the main focus of care.

Above is the definition of palliative care from the Clinical Practice Guidelines for Quality Palliative Care, National Consensus Project. It clearly distinguishes palliative care from both traditional curative medicine, as well as from hospice care, while at the same time incorporating both.
The focus of our program is to:

1. Help community, clinic providers recognize patients in the last 1-2 years of life.
2. Reach out to end of life patients and their families each month to assess physical, emotional and spiritual well being.
3. Offer advance care planning sessions which focus on patient and family values and wishes regarding end of life care.
4. Recruit, train, and support community volunteers that call a caseload of patients each month.
5. Coordinate and connect end of life patients with community resources already in existence, but often underutilized.
6. Increase patient, family and physician satisfaction during end of life care.
7. Decrease unnecessary and/or unwanted hospitalizations and emergency room visits during the last year(s) of life.
8. Increase Home Health referrals for patients who are home bound.
9. Increase exposure for patient and family education about the Hospice philosophy, mission and benefit.
10. Increase Hospice referrals and length of service days.



History:
Our program is relatively new to our agency, although Providence Hospice & Home Care has been around for 26 years. We currently are working in partnership with The Everett Clinic - Internal Medicine department and we are looking to expand into other clinics within the community.


Contact person: Charla Hattendorf, Volunteer Coordinator, (425) 261-4769, (email)

Address:


2731 Wetmore, Ste 500 Everett, WA 98201 (See a map)


Web Site: http://www.providence.org\phhc

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Overall Experience   
An opportunity to help others while doing something you love.

Palliative Care Partners and Hospice/Homecare of Snohomish County...this organization has enriched my soul and rewarded me beyond what any paycheck could ever have done. posted by LeslieJMiller on September 29, 2004