Health Care Decisions Month: Educate and Train Staff and Employees

SCHCDM

Mar 3

Health care professionals, whether physicians, nurses or social workers, may feel uncomfortable engaging with patients and families in advance care planning conversations.

But, there is good news…

There is education and training available to help staff and employees on how to effectively support patients and families in having advance care planning conversations.

My Life My Choices offers the following training resources to support your efforts:

This April is South Carolina Health Care Decisions Month, and we are challenging everyone across the state, including health care professionals, to express their goals of care and for their health care providers and facilities to develop supportive processes to ensure every person’s health care is in accordance with their goals, values and preferences—at all stages of life, in all steps of their care.

The goal of this month is to help South Carolinians understand that making future health care decisions includes much more than deciding what care they would or would not want.

These trainings offer a great way to lead by example and incorporate Health Care Decisions Month in your organization.

View the S.C. Health Care Decisions Month Toolkit

Health care professionals may receive continuing education for completion of specified educational modules. All individuals trained in Respecting Choices® First Steps® will be recognized as certified advance care planning facilitators.

My Life My Choices has trained over 1,000 health care providers throughout South Carolina and has over 25 trained instructors utilizing Ariadne Lab’s Serious Illness Conversation Program. Our goal is to continue to build capacity of physicians trained in conducting effective, high quality advance care planning conversations with their seriously ill patients.

This curriculum helps clinicians conduct share-decision making and explore goals, fears, strengths, critical abilities, tradeoffs, and family awareness. Clinicians are also able to recommend a way forward.

We recommend that health care providers take an interdisciplinary approach to training clinicians, recognizing that the physician alone cannot conduct meaningful advance care planning conversations. This education and training are not meant to overburden physicians, but to increase their ability to have these conversations with their patients. Both curricula are evidence-based, and patient-tested.

Contact My Life My Choices at info@mylifemychoices.org for information on available training in your area.

And join us this April for South Carolina Health Care Decisions Month by pledging to participate here.

Take the S.C. Health Care Decisions Month Pledge

Best Practice: Trained Chaplains Offer Spiritual Support Through Advance Care Planning

AnMed Health engages its Respecting Choices® First Steps® trained chaplains in supporting advance care planning at the practice level. Physician practices schedule advance care planning appointments with patients once it is introduced by the clinician. Chaplains then facilitate the remainder of the advance care planning conversation.

These appointments are billed under the CMS advance care planning codes. In the two years since the program’s launch, AnMed Health has conducted more than 1,200 advanced care planning conversations. Of those conversations conducted in 2018, over 90 percent chaplain-facilitated conversations resulted in completed advance directives.

Their success is driven by the recognition that document completion alone is not a substitute for quality conversations. AnMed continues to expand their education and training efforts to support quality conversations using an evidence-based, patient-tested training model that is intended to honor individual health care choices.

Resource: AnMed Health’s Chaplaincy Program Takes Advanced Care Planning into Physician Practices »

View Toolkit

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