Grief, Loss & Bereavement Edublog

One of the most important thing you can do, a gift you can give to your loves one is to talk to them about your preferences for end of life care and even put your wishes in writing. Talking about about your wishes in advance with your family know can make it easier to make decision about end of life care.

A new project, Engage with Grace: The One Slide Project was launched in 2008 in the hopes of getting people talking about end of life care. They are hosting a blog rally over the Thanksgiving weekend to get the word out about talking about the difficult questions on End of Life Care.

My Experiences with End of Life Issues

When in practice I helped many families initiate the discussion about end of life care. I also had to help within my own family when my sister’s father-in-law was determined to be terminal.  As with Za’s story, the physicians in Bob’s case felt he needed to stay in the hospital to die. The family had other ideas. I documented the story in “Caring For The Person, Not Just The Patient In End-of-Life Care.”

By educating the family about hospice care, they had a choice. With information about hospice and what they might expect they felt empowered to go against the wishes of the medical team and take Bob home.

Bob went home, not to die, but to live until the time came. The end came “On his own Terms,” two days after leaving the hospital. This country boy was home, living in his own bed with his family, not dying in a big-city hospital.

As with Za’s case, the family, my sister’s family also pushed to get their loved one home, to die on his own terms.

Engage with Grace

Engage with Grace co-founders created a single slide with 5 questions “designed to help get us talking with each other, with our loved ones, about our preferences.”

Furthermore they are asking people to share this One Slide — wherever and whenever they can in blogs, in presentations and in conversations.

To learn more about what you can do visit the Engage with Grace website. You can also read the related post Engage with Grace Project – Thanksgiving Blog Rally 0n the Grief, Loss & Transitions Blog.

More:

Dyer KA. 2009. Put Your Advanced Directives in Writing as a Gift to Your Family. Grief, Loss & Bereavement Edublog.

Dyer KA. 2009. No Surprise – New Study Shows Hospice Patients Feel Abandoned by Physicians. Grief, Loss & Bereavement Edublog.

Dyer KA. 1999.Caring For The Person, Not Just The Patient In End-of-Life Care.Presented at Dealing with Death & Dying in Medical Education and Practice. AMSA Convention March 30, 2001. Journey of Hearts.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 25th, 2009 at 11:37 am and is filed under End of Life Care, Grieving Family. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.