Common Sense Guide to Improving Palliative Care

Improving care for the patients who are in the last phase of their lives has been a field that most health care providers have struggled with during last few years. Having worked with hundreds of providers throughout the country, these experienced authors know what providers need when it comes to implementing a quality improvement project. This guide will provide user-friendly, step-by-step instructions on how to implement a quality improvement project in the full range of care settings. The instructions will be brought to life with specific examples from actual successful projects and key information on the best practices in the industry. Readers will also be pointed to resources available online and elsewhere, with information on how to access them. The guide will be written in an informal, maximally helpful style, with checklists, tables, and boxed information. Answering 80% of the questions in less than half the space, The Common Sense Guide is the perfect portable companion to Dr. Lynn's desk reference, Improving Care for the End of Life. The book will be of great interest to all health care professionals involved in the care of those with serious chronic illness -- doctors, nurses, social workers, chaplains, clinic administrators, quality improvement experts, and so forth.

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.
Janice Lynch Schuster has worked with Joanne Lynn, M.D., for almost a decade. She is the co-author of Improving Care for the End of Life: A Sourcebook for Health Care Managers and Clinicians. She has written materials for many agencies and organizations, including the National Institute on Aging, and for publications, such as The Washington Post.
Joanne Lynn, M.D., a Senior Natural Scientist with RAND, works to improve care for persons facing serious, eventually fatal, chronic illness (www.MediCaring.org). For thirty years, she attended nursing homes, home, and hospice patients. She was Professor of Medicine and led the SUPPORT project. Dr. Lynn has anchored a dozen quality improvement collaboratives. Her publications include The Handbook for Mortals, a book for the public Improving Care for the End of Life, a guide to CQI for managers and clinicians; and Sick to Death and Not Going to Take it Any More!, a guide to policy reform for the last years of life.