‘Faces of Caring’ Need Our Support, Now and Always By Jennifer Moore Ballentine

This month, in line with National Hospice and Palliative Care Month, we are celebrating Faces of Caring. In our social media and email communications, we’ve highlighted just a few of our inspiring students and outstanding faculty. Faces of Caring are everywhere—especially in this time of extreme stress and ongoing crisis.

These days, the Faces of Caring I see are either bobbling in Zoom frames or swathed in masks–the blue pleated surgical style or made of festive fabric or displaying sassy slogans. Their noses, chins, and ears are rubbed raw, foreheads dented, and spirits holding but assailed. They are physicians and housekeepers, nurse aides and nurses, social workers and therapists, food prep workers and chaplains, physician assistants and records clerks. They are all genders, all ages, all races. They are all essential.

[Read more…] about ‘Faces of Caring’ Need Our Support, Now and Always

 

Finding the Right Messages for Serious Illness Care By Larry Beresford

Almost everyone involved in serious illness care agrees the field has an identity problem. Palliative care, hospice, and advance care planning are often poorly understood by consumers, the public, and even healthcare professionals. The resulting confusion can keep people who need those critical services from accessing or accepting them.

Developing clear and consistent messages that will penetrate misconceptions and unlock barriers to care for patients and families is the goal of the Message Lab, a project funded by the John A. Hartford and Cambia Health Foundations.

[Read more…] about Finding the Right Messages for Serious Illness Care

Hospice Professionals Rediscover Resilience in their Work

By Larry Beresford 

Eight months into the COVID-19 pandemic, hospice and palliative care professionals are tired and struggling under the constraints of PPE, changes in how care is delivered, and the knowledge that some patients under quarantine in care facilities may be dying alone. 

Community-based care teams are facing difficulties not seen in the field since the AIDS epidemic, said Carla Cheatham, MA, MDiv, PhD, chair of the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization (NHPCO) Ethics Advisory Council, and a leader in workplace resilience programs through her Carla Cheatham Consulting Group.

[Read more…] about Hospice Professionals Rediscover Resilience in their Work

What I Learned From Off-the-Charts Pain By Jennifer Moore Ballentine

A week after my first chemo infusion for breast cancer, I woke up feeling like I’d been beaten with sticks. By mid-morning, my temperature was 103^◦ and I headed to the ER. By the time I was admitted with neutropenic fever, I was discovering the true meaning of the phrase “My head is about to explode.”

The pain was unbelievable. I couldn’t think, I couldn’t see, I could barely hear what seemed like a parade of disembodied voices offering this or that remedy, all of which had exactly zero effect on the pain.

The morphine had an effect—but not the desired one. The only thing that helped at all, the only thing that got me through the next 48 hours, was a CD player, headphones, and the neoclassical dark wave group Dead Can Dance on continuous replay.

[Read more…] about What I Learned From Off-the-Charts Pain