The Common Sense Guide to Improving Palliative Care

Written by the leading quality improvement experts and clinicians, The Common Sense Guide to Improving Palliative Care provides a quick and easy "how-to" introduction to quality improvement in palliative care. Each chapter features a case study that illustrates how successful quality improvement teams work and includes dozens of ideas for change that most groups can put into practice - now! In today's healthcare settings, too many patients and families suffer needlessly for dozens of reasons. Healthcare teams can and must take charge of reform. With equal measures of proven, practical advice and encouragement, The Common Sense Guide enables them to do just that in a wide array of settings.

1 - An Orientation
2 - Basics of Quality Improvement
3 - Advance Care Planning
4 - Preventing, Assessing, and Treating Pain
5 - Assuring Comfort
6 - Caring for Caregivers
7 - Continuity and Transfers
8 - Chronic Care: Heart and Lung Failure
9 - Nursing Home Quality: Pressure Ulcers
10 - Improving Care for People with Advanced Dementia and Their Families
11 - Improving Intensive Care Units
12 - Building a Palliative Care Program
13 - Hospice Program Quality
14 - End-of-Life Care, Spiritual Support, and Bereavement
15 - Beyond Quality Improvement: Policy Improvement

Ekta Chaudhry, M.B.B.S, MHSA, is a quality improvement specialist who consults with organizations nationwide. She has co-directed various palliative care collaboratives in effort to improve care for patients nearing end of life. Lin Simon has worked improving care for people with dementia for over twenty years and brings clinical experiences to the book. She has participated in several regional collaboratives and has worked with nurses at the bedside in long term care to improve care of older adults. Anne M. Wilkinson, M.S., Ph.D., Dr. Wilkinson is a Senior Social and Behavioral Scientist with the RAND Corporation, a non-profit policy analysis think tank and also Director, The Palliative Care Policy Center, a research and educational center focusing on policy and quality improvement issues related to end of life care. She has served as principal investigator on a number of studies ranging from the evaluation of state nursing facility regulations on dementia care in nursing homes,systematic reviews of the evidence base for evaluating quality end-of-life care, to conducting focus groups of family caregivers CHF and COPD patients to investigate the caregiving experience.