Caregiving Help Library
Care of the Dying Part 4: Encouraging Conversations About Death |
Continued
I trusted Millie completely and always knew my Mom was in good hands when she was with Millie. My family will always be deeply grateful to Millie for her excellent care of our sweet mother.
GraceFul Care, now in its sixth year of service, is not the only organization dedicated to helping to improve the way that we care for our seniors. In 1996, across the United States in Missoula Montana a physician named Ira Byock launched a project to investigate and improve the dying process in his community. As was the case with GraceFul Care, Dr. Byock's contemplation how death is approached in the United States was influenced in part by his experience a parent.
During his medical residency in California, his father, terminally ill with cancer, agreed to die in Byock's Fresno home, attended by his wife and son and daughter-in-law. It was a hard but illuminating experience that Byock thought did honor to them all. And it stayed in his mind for years before his thoughts about how he wanted to change the American way of dying began to jell. Footnote 26
It was many years later that Dr. Byock enlisted the help of friends and colleagues to initiate the Missoula Demonstration Project (MDP). The MDP seeks to initiate conversations about death in Missoula, and to make the dying process better for residents of the town. It has as its mission
To research the experience of dying and the determinants of quality at life's end.
To demonstrate that a community-based approach of excellent physical, psychosocial and spiritual care improves the quality of life for dying persons and their families. Fotonote 27
The Project, now in its fifth year of fifteen, is an effort to demonstrate that a community can give its citizens excellent medical care, psychosocial support and can consistently improve the quality of life among those who are dying and their families. Footnote 28 The MDP's rests on the assumption that
prevailing attitudes about the end of life poorly serve patients, families of patients and care providers. Society as a whole suffers from the pervasive denial of death and from the lack of attention to the end of life. For many, attending to the end of life is not even a consideration. . .
As the research progresses, MDP hopes to demonstrate that improved care at the end of life and enhanced personal experience for individuals and families can be achieved through discussion of individual and community goals. MDP fosters that discussion among hundreds of individuals who serve on our local task forces, who agree to be objects of our research and who participate in MDP programs. Our method is to provide pertinent data from the research to the community as a catalyst for discussion and an avenue for change. Footnote 29
The MDP has advanced its work through many task forces. A pain task force worked to make the alleviation of pain a priority of local health agencies. Footnote 30 A storytelling task force encourages people to record their life histories. Footnote 31 An advanced care planning task force created an advanced-care directive for Missoula County called "My Choices." Footnote 32 A faith communities task force provides a forum to learn about many different religious traditions seek to ease the experience of death, dying, and grief. Footnote 33 And a schools task force is gathering information about how local schools are addressing end of life issues. Foottnote 34 Together, all of the task forces are beginning to help integrate the process of dying onto the lives of people in Missoula.
25 Rinpoche , Sogyal Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. (New York: Harper Collins,1994), p. 174.
26 Atcheson, Richard. The Missoula Experiment: How a small town learned to make dying a part of life. Modern Maturity, September - October 2000. Also available electronically at http://www.aarp.org/mmaturity/sept-oct00/missoula.html.
27 Information available electronically from the Missoula Demonstration Project website http://www.missoulademonstration.org, April 2001.
28 Information available electronically from the Missoula Demonstration Project website http://www.missoulademonstration.org, April 2001.
29 Information available electronically from the Missoula Demonstration Project website http://www.missoulademonstration.org, April 2001.
30 Atcheson, Richard. The Missoula Experiment: How a smalltown learned to make dying a part of life.
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