Trellis Supportive Care, Novant Health, and Wake Forest Baptist Health have come together to promote a common cause in the Piedmont Triad region of North Carolina!

 

 

 

 

 

We have recognized the importance of advance care planning for our patients and our community-at-large.  Our goal is to promote advance care planning so that our communities are educated and engaged in the process.  Why?...

 

 

...because you deserve to have your 

end-of-life wishes known and honored!

 

 

The Community Partnership for Compassionate Care (formerly known as the Community Partnership for End of Life Care) is a regional coalition of the North Carolina Partnership for Compassionate Care.  The Community Partnership for Compassionate Care is an award- winning, nationally-recognized partnership designed to encourage and facilitate the advance care planning process.  The partnership and its members have created “Got Plans?” and related resources to help promote decisions, discussions, and documentation related to the advance care planning process. 

 

Our vision for community education:

Imagine a community where the approach to dying is couched in a philosophy of living as well as possible until death, including effective pain management, help for caregivers and sensitivity to patients' wishes and dignity.  Visualize an entire community knowing how to plan ahead to ensure those wishes are honored; one where families all have easy access to grief and bereavement support.  Picture physicians comfortable talking about death and dying and eager to help honor patient's wishes.  Our mission is to "encourage conversations about end of life care".

 

History

Over the past 14 years, Trellis Supportive Care has led the way in advance care planning, collaborating with several healthcare organizations and attorneys throughout the Piedmont Triad region of NC to form the Community Partnership for End of Life Care (now referred to as The Community Partnership for Compassionate Care). The mission of this partnership has been to “encourage conversations about end of life care.” Working closely with other healthcare partners, one of the primary goals became the creation of a simplified advance directive for North Carolina and a regional initiative for advance care planning.

 

The Partnership's inaugural event in January 2001 brought 200+ people to a community-wide forum addressing how to improve end of life care in our area.  Governor Beverly Perdue was the keynote speaker and Senator Richard Burr was the closing speaker.  Since that time, the Partnership has won several awards for its work in the community.

 

The group was successful in creating a much more user-friendly advance directive, taking a complicated 10 pages of forms and condensing them to 5 pages (2 pages of instructions, 3 pages of forms).  John Moskop, PhD, led the initiative at Wake Forest Baptist Health along with Jay Foster, DMin, Keith Stirewalt, PA-C, MDiv, MBA and Beth Gianopulos, JD.  Leaders from Novant Health included Melissa Phipps, JD, Deb Love, JD, MBA, MA, Tom Bauer, Dee Leahman and Reba Teeter.  Aimee Smith, JD, Kate Mewhinney, JD, other local attorneys and several local medical centers including Cone Health and High Point Regional Health participated.

 

These simplified advance directive forms for NC are currently being used at Wake Forest Baptist Health, Novant Health, Trellis Supportive Care, Cone Health, High Point Regional Health, UNC Health Care, Mission Health, Randolph Hospital, Morehead Memorial Hospital, Hospice of Randolph County, and Begin the Conversation with Lower Cape Fear Hospice & LifeCareCenter.

 

If you are interested in learning more about using the simplified advance directive forms at your institution, please email us.

 

A sub-committee of this team has been working to promote advance care planning and the simplified advance directives by reaching out to both the medical community and the public.  This will be an ongoing initiative, entitled “Got Plans?”.  If you are interested in having someone come speak to your group or organization about advance care planning, please let us know!

 

 

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