Caregiving

Maryann Schacht, MSW, BCD, is an author, speaker, and workshop leader with more than 30 years experience working with families in crisis. Her book titled A Caregiver’s Challenge: Living, Loving, Letting Go offers a road map and survival guide to everyone who is suddenly thrust into a caregiver role. She combines her personal experience caring for her terminally ill husband with her professional expertise in this invaluable resource. A Caregiver’s Challenge offers support, resources, and useful exercises for caregivers and their patients.

Maryann is frequently interviewed on national radio about caregivers and comfort care issues and may be contacted at 707-537-9419.

Americans for Better Care of the Dying goals are to: build momentum for reform; explore new methods and systems for delivering care; and shape public policy through evidence-based understanding.

Every dying person needs to be able to count on excellent care. Americans for Better Care of the Dying (ABCD) aims to improve end-of-life care by learning which social and political changes will lead to enduring, efficient, and effective programs. ABCD works with the public, clinicians, policymakers, and other end-of-life organizations to make change happen.

ABCD President Joanne Lynn, MD is one of the foremost national leaders in this movement and the author of Handbook for Mortals: Guidance for People Facing Serious Illness; and Improving Care for the End of Life.

This important study and related reports released by the California Healthcare Foundation in March 16, 2007 reports that: In California, the most populous and diverse state in the country, significant racial and ethnic differences exist at the end of life. These reports – the first in a new series of CHCF-supported projects focusing on end-of-life issues - found significant variations in the expectations, experiences, and decisions of patients and their families in the months preceding death.

“As California’s diverse population grows older, ensuring quality care at the end of life for everyone takes on even greater significance,” Mark D. Smith, M.D., M.B.A., president and CEO of CHCF, said Thursday at the Association of Health Care Journalists conference in Los Angeles. “By supporting research and projects to improve the quality of end-of-life care, CHCF sees an opportunity to help make California a national example of best medical practices and culturally appropriate care.”

Care of the Patient with Severe Chronic Illness-An Online Report on the Medicare Program is a key critical report completed in 2006 by the Dartmouth Atlas Project. It reports that: “Almost one-third of Medicare spending for chronically ill is unnecessary… A fundamental problem, and one that contributes to both overspending and worse outcomes, is that most acute care hospitals have become first-line providers of services to chronically ill elderly people, whose care would be better managed, safer and less expensive outside the hospital setting. . . . Staggering variations in how hospitals care for chronically ill elderly patients indicate serious problems with quality of care and point toward unnecessary spending by Medicare. Lower utilization of acute care hospitals and physician visits could actually lead to better results for patients and prolong the solvency of the Medicare program.” The study calls for overhauling how the nation manages chronic illness, and proposes that hospitals take leadership in redesigning how they care for the chronically ill.

Caring Connections, a program of the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization (NHPCO), is a national consumer engagement initiative to improve care at the end of life, supported by a grant from The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Caring Connections
-Provides free resources, information and motivation for actively learning about end-of-life resources.
-Promotes awareness of and engagement in efforts to increase access to quality end-of-life care.
-Helps people connect with the resources they need, when they need them.
-Brings together community, state and national partners working to improve end-of-life care.