We’re excited to announce that a multidisciplinary team from Fenway Health has completed a yearlong Institute for Healthcare Improvement Collaborative called The Conversation Project. The Conversation Project, which launched in 2010, is dedicated to helping people talk about their wishes for end-of-life care.
According to the Project website, “Too many people are dying in a way they wouldn’t choose, and too many of their loved ones are left feeling bereaved, guilty, and uncertain. It’s time to transform our culture so we shift from not talking about dying to talking about it. It’s time to share the way we want to live at the end of our lives. And it’s time to communicate about the kind of care we want and don’t want for ourselves.”
The Fenway team was joined by 20 other facilities and groups including elderly residential sites, VNA and Hospice organizations, hospitals, and long term care facilities. Fenway was the only primary care practice in the group. The mission of the collaborative was to find better ways to talk to our patients about end of life decisions, document those conversations, and make them easily accessible when they are needed. The team will continue to meet and refine our processes to gather Health Care Proxies and Advanced Directives in an effort to streamline and normalize these important conversations.
We’d like to thank Fenway staff members Robb Johnson, Laura Branford-White, Dana King, Jenna Cassoli, Christy Odell, Alex Gonzalez, and Peg Nelson for participating in this important project.
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