Most healthcare administrators want a detailed description of how your palliative care program will work before they will lend their support to the venture. Just as a blueprint provides a detailed picture of how a new building will look before it is built, so too a policies and procedures manual provides a picture of how a new program will operate before it is launched.
To draft policies and procedures for your program, start from the beginning and move toward the end. Begin with a description of your program's basic structure: its mission, goals, and core components. Next describe your program's organizational structure, its staffing needs, and staff roles and responsibilities. Think next of the program's patients: Outline the referral process, present admission criteria, and describe the enrollment procedure. Include descriptions of the care planning process, the services available to patients and their families, and discharge procedures. Finally, present a plan for quality assurance and program evaluation.
To help you get started, we have presented the policies and procedures for the TCPC Program in this Toolkit. In the previous chapter, we described our program's basic structure, including its mission, goals, and core components. In the following two chapters, we present detailed procedures for the TCPC Program — from staffing to program evaluation. Feel free to use or adapt these policies and procedures for your program.
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For more information about the TriCentral Palliative Care Toolkit visit www.growthhouse.org/palliative/. All content is Copyright © 2002, 2003 by Richard D. Brumley, M.D. All rights reserved. No part of this toolkit may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the publishers. This guide to developing home-based outpatient palliative care services was developed through a grant to the Kaiser Permanente TriCentral Service Area from The Project on Death In America. The Kaiser Permanente TriCentral Palliative Care Program is a Sustaining Member of the Inter-Institutional Collaborating Network On End-of-life Care (IICN) which links major organizations internationally.
