Three rural New Hampshire communities (Lebanon, Manchester and Berlin) working with the Norris Cotton Cancer Center at Dartmouth are improving end-of-life care for cancer patients.|
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Updated February 17, 2005
Three rural New Hampshire communities (Lebanon, Manchester and Berlin) working with the Norris Cotton Cancer Center at Dartmouth are improving end-of-life care for cancer patients.
Project ENABLE (Educate, Nurture, Advise Before Life Ends) coordinates care between the cancer center and local health care providers and hospices. They do so by integrating the curative care provided by the Dartmouth-based cancer center with the palliative, or comprehensive comfort and supportive care, provided by the local hospice teams.
ENABLE's palliative care coordinators work with patients and families following diagnosis, helping to individualize each person's care plan in accordance with their and their family's preferences. They also strive to ensure continuity of care during the course of the illness.
Concurrently, each of Project ENABLE's three communities have palliative care teams consisting of a pain management specialist, a psychiatrist or psychologist, a hospice or home health liaison, a social worker or case manager and a pastoral caregiver. Each team tailors its work to the specific health care system in the community.
In addition to Project ENABLE's holistic approach to patient care, families and patients attend educational seminars. These sessions help families and patients navigate the health care system, have open and meaningful dialogue with physicians, understand advanced care planning, individualized decision-making and symptom and stress management, and understand the stages of dying and normal issues of life completion and life closure.
"Project ENABLE will allow us to demonstrate that, regardless of geographic location, cultural identification, or clinical sophistication, patients need not be abandoned when a cure for their disease seems no longer possible," said E. Robert Greenberg, MD, Principal Investigator for the project.
The Charting Your Course program is a series of four seminars, meant to help you learn how to navigate your health care. Charting Your Course is intended for people recently diagnosed with cancer, their family members, and friends. Financial support in developing these workshops and preparing them for the Internet and CD presentation was provided by the national program office of Promoting Excellence in The End Of Life for Care.
Promoting Excellence in End-of-Life Care is a national program of The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation dedicated to long-term changes in health care institutions to substantially improve care for dying people and their families. Visit PromotingExcellence.org for more resources.
