As the Supportive Care Coalition developed over the past decade, it has worked to improve palliative care throughout the practice settings of its member organizations.  It has used Supportive Voice, conferences, and networking to accomplish knowledge transfer.  Still, it is difficult to implement successful practices across the ministry when, even within a single health system, one facility may not know what practices are used in a sister facility.  The power of multi-media technology could change that.

Over the years the Coalition has earned a very respectable reputation in education as well as in data gathering. Education tends to adopt a “push” mode to disseminate innovative ideas for intervention and care. Data gathering tends to function in a “pull” mode to compile relevant information that is crucial both for scientific research and quality assessment.  Much more could be done if the “push” and “pull” of education and data gathering were enhanced through the creative use of multi-media and information technology.  Widespread use of a communication model that employs sophisticated learning tools such as interactive web sites could enable Catholic health care to become a distinctive and dominant leader in palliative care for patients with life-threatening illnesses.  Because it already represents Catholic health care’s collaborative effort to improve palliative care, the Coalition could play an important role in bringing that about.

At the Coalition’s national congress in San Antonio earlier this year, executive director Sr. Karin Dufault discussed the Coalition’s commitment to advance palliative care through education, research, and advocacy.  An important aspect of the Coalition’s advocacy for change is to “push” education out to the health care communities (professionals, patients, and families alike) and “pull” back data for research and assessment (advancing scientific research and quality improvement together).  But given the complexity of our health care system and the many demands on health care providers at all levels of our organizations, this is not enough to insure that palliative care programs spread throughout the ministry.

In today’s high-tech age, the challenge is to learn how to harness creative and innovative mechanisms to pursue excellence in communication about palliative care. To do so, Catholic health care needs to learn more adeptly not only to integrate resources collaboratively by working together but also to disperse energies efficiently across many different communities in a way that avoids unnecessary duplication. The basic tenet in this ministry of supportive care for patients, families, and professionals is communication, communication, communication!

If, for example, members of the Coalition decided to adopt a model of care throughout all their facilities, such as CALL Care, multi-media technology could provide a platform to establish a shared approach for working together.  The strategy to advance that goal could integrate 3 tiers of communication, each employing multi-media technology.  The first tier would deal with communications to and between executive leaders of health systems, hospitals, care facilities and services. The growth of the initiative would depend upon leadership and support from the senior executives in Catholic health care. Attracting the attention of busy executives requires not only an opportunity to present the information but also the identification of clear advantages that could accrue to the organization. A short 5-minute video for executive leaders explaining the model of palliative care could enhance their understanding of the need for such services.  The video could lead the executives to a network of web sites and electronic support for the types of services available. These could include education about business plans for effective palliative care programs and tools for data gathering about outcomes for subsequent research and quality assessment.

The second tier would address communication between these executives and care teams and among the care teams themselves. The success of the ministry will be determined by the quality of the care teams providing services to patients and families, so eliciting the interest and commitment of care providers is key.  Fostering an ongoing and constructive interaction among team members will require education and reliable data gathering to demonstrate the effectiveness of their efforts.  A short 12 to 15 minute video could be developed to foster group learning in small interdisciplinary teams for palliative care staff in different facilities, perhaps using a facilitation guide or including trained facilitators.  In addition, for more intense training, professionals could take an on-line 2 to 3 hour course on excellence in palliative care consisting of video, text, and quiz.  Such a course could measure learning outcomes and provide continuing education credits for physicians, nurses, social workers and chaplains.  The communication strategy could include education on the necessity of integrating services and the importance of recruiting colleagues and building interdisciplinary teams.   Again, the health care team could be supported by websites that might include patient care profiles and case studies of successful practices, as well as tools that facilitate gathering outcomes data for research and quality assessment.

The third tier would pursue communication between care teams and their patients/families as well as among the patient/families themselves. The purpose would be to provide supportive care that meets the needs of patients and families and provides information to the health care team as to their effectiveness in doing so.  Each patient and family could receive a short 12-minute DVD.R to explain what palliative care is and how it might help in their situation. The video could use case studies to describe similarly situated patients and families. It might include a checklist of relevant services the patient/family should expect from their palliative care team.  The DVD.R could also provide a link to a confidential web site for feedback on quality of care to provide quantitative and qualitative assessment data and to websites designed to provide information and support to patients and families.

In conclusion, it behooves Catholic health care to be at the front-end of the communication wave by using state-of-the-art methods.  Coalition members could enhance their mission to improve palliative care by employing a communication strategy that takes advantage of the exciting opportunities presented by interactive multi-media and information technology.