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What Do You Mean You Don’t Also Offer Palliative Care? Effective Public Engagement to Harness Demand to Improve Care for Serious Illness

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Meeting the Needs of Older Adults with Serious Illness

Part of the book series: Aging Medicine ((AGME))

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Abstract

Public engagement is necessary to improve care for individuals suffering with serious illness. Early, concurrent palliative care has been shown to improve quality and patient/family satisfaction while also supporting system needs. If public engagement is to be effective in improving care for the seriously ill in this country, then advocates need to adjust their current approach. Current public engagement efforts on advance directives (ADs) and the advance care planning process (ACP) focus on anticipating medical decisions in the context of death and dying. These are emotionally frightening and negatively charged concepts which are not experienced as immediately relevant to people who are not imminently dying and are routinely avoided by the general public. Effective public engagement strategies would create public demand for palliative care services and empower patients to access these services. Communication strategies building public demand are needed to create system change that integrates concurrent palliative care for the seriously ill across settings. Public demand for palliative care will drive market changes for these services. It will also encourage policy that mandates palliative care and allocates necessary resources for training, research, and service delivery. Successful public engagement will foster an image of what quality care should look like and define calls to action that increase availability and access to palliative care. Effective messaging will replace negative stories focusing on death and dying with empowering stories of situations that offer a positive vision of achievable, personally relevant, and desirable outcomes.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. The John Hopkins University, Washington, DC, USA

    Sharyn M. Sutton Ph.D., Masters of Arts in Communication

  2. University of Maryland School of Nursing, Baltimore, MD, USA

    Marian S. Grant D.N.P., C.R.N.P., R.N.

Authors
  1. Sharyn M. Sutton Ph.D., Masters of Arts in Communication
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  2. Marian S. Grant D.N.P., C.R.N.P., R.N.
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Sharyn M. Sutton Ph.D., Masters of Arts in Communication .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Brookdale Department of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, New York, USA

    Amy S. Kelley

  2. Brookdale Department of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, New York, USA

    Diane E. Meier

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Sutton, S.M., Grant, M.S. (2014). What Do You Mean You Don’t Also Offer Palliative Care? Effective Public Engagement to Harness Demand to Improve Care for Serious Illness. In: Kelley, A., Meier, D. (eds) Meeting the Needs of Older Adults with Serious Illness. Aging Medicine. Humana Press, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0407-5_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0407-5_14

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  • Publisher Name: Humana Press, New York, NY

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4939-0406-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4939-0407-5

  • eBook Packages: MedicineMedicine (R0)

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