Community Engagement Newsletter May 14, 2019
How to Talk to Your Patients about End-of-Life Care
This new toolkit is intended to help clinicians address some of the challenges of engaging with patients and families in end-of-life care conversations over time. The four cases present patients with diverse backgrounds and experiences at different points of illness, as well as diverse clinicians and care settings. Each case describes the progression of the patient’s illness and outlines key considerations for clinicians to engage the patient and family in discussions about what matters most to the patient at the end of life. 

6 Go-to Health Care Resources: Respecting End-of-life Care Wishes

The key to ensuring that everyone's end-of-life wishes are respected is ensuring that healthcare providers are equipped with the knowledge, skills and resources necessary to respect the wishes of their patients'. Check out this piece that offers 6 helpful resources for healthcare providers who are dedicated to honoring the values of their patients'.

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Upcoming Community Calls
May 15th 3:00-4:30 PM EDT: Working Together -Organizing and Building Coalitions
We will highlight lessons from several groups, including a local grassroots advocate and organizer in Washington State and a state-wide coalition in South Carolina. Hear the stories they bring to the work, steps they took, key people they engaged, lessons on funding and more! Join us to share your pearls of wisdom and/or learn from others as you think about joining forces with others to spread this work further.

June 19th 3:00-4:00 PM EDT: Community Planning 101
This webinar provides an overview of The Conversation Project and our work in the community. This call will enable you to bring The Conversation Project to individuals in your community where they live, work, and pray by providing you with information on tools and resources available online, guided questions to consider for your region, and examples of how to set and attain specific goals.

When Wishes Are Not Respected at End-of-Life
David Wood, MD, the Chief Medical Officer at Beaumont Health in Michigan, describes the challenging experience he faced as the surrogate decision maker for his father at the end of life.  Click here to watch the video !
TCP Quarterly Community Activity Survey Results
Our team recently asked for your participation in first Quarterly Community Activity Survey of 2019. A huge THANK YOU to all who participated! Special recognition to our two winners of $50 Amazon gift cards: our colleagues Nicola Finch from Cariboo Community Deathcaring Network in British Columbia, Canada and
Donald McDonah from St. Joseph Hospital in Nashua, New Hampshire!

We are excited to share results from the first quarter of 2019! 117 community groups or individuals responded, reporting over 1,300 events/activities from January through March 2019. Over 18,000 people were reached by these in-person events. These face-to-face activities combined with sharing materials, tools and messages on the importance of conversations through newsletters, email messages, social media, and traditional media outlets, totaled to over 240,000 engagements! Two groups reached over 1,000 individuals face-to-face in their communities in just three months! While 55% of these organizations/individuals hosted 5 or fewer events between January and March (median was 4), we had 7 groups hosting over 50 events and 4 groups hosting more than 100 events each! Great job to all! 83% of these events had fewer than 25 people (median was 10). And, many of you are providing one-on-one consults bringing targeted support and personal guidance, in addition to hosting group events. We love hearing how deep and wide your support is spanning.

The breakdown of total number of engagements is listed below:
We continue to see a rich variety of individuals and organizations deeply involved in this work. Check out the mix of respondents to our survey below. 
We are so proud of these incredible champions! And, if you haven’t yet added your pin to our Conversation Champions map on our Get Involved page – or if you haven’t yet explored our map - please click here ! Scroll down to the bottom of the page and add your pin to showcase what you are doing and connect with others!
 
Last but certainly not least, we are so grateful for all you are doing to bring conversations to your community. THANK YOU and please continue to share your activities/learning with us across 2019 in our next survey!
 
Additional results will be shared in our next newsletter on how groups are tackling sustainability. Stay tuned for more!
Listen to Your Mother
If you are in Paris, Texas or Paris, France, and you get word that I am near death, please do not feel that you need to rush to my bedside. You’ve always been “there” for me in life, and that’s what matters to me.

Read this lovely letter from a mom to her beloved children about what matter most to her. Inspired? Want to have your letter to your loved one featured on our blog? We’ll be collecting as many letters as we can and hope to share different examples with you as we receive them. Send your letter to [email protected].

April 2019 Recap
This past April, The Conversation Project produced and helped develop a multitude of new resources designed to further our initiative of ensuring that everyone, everywhere expresses their end-of-life wishes and that their wishes are respected. From animated videos to launching a letter-writing campaign, these new materials/resources underscore the importance of having the conversation and they can be put to use in a number of ways: you can easily share them if you’re leading a presentation in your setting, they can act as helpful content to engage your social media audience, or they can be presented as evidence to gain stakeholder buy-in. 
 
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Conversation Champion Highlight: Healthy Peninsula Choices that Matter
Healthy Peninsula has used collective impact strategies to improve the health of various communities in Maine. They serve a wide range of people, from precious newborns to valued elderly, and are dedicated to helping ensure good health at all stages of their lives. Healthy Peninsula launched Choices That Matter--an initiative where they train volunteer facilitators that meet with groups or individuals to help them begin the conversation. They also offer educational series and workshops related to the importance of advance care planning. This group has used The Conversation Project's Conversation Starter Kit and joined our community calls to help strengthen their model for care. Learn more about them here !

Click here  to put your organization on The Conversation Project's Conversation Champion Map and possibly be featured in our next newsletter!

News Roundup: What We're Reading
DOWNLOAD OUR FREE KITS!
The Conversation Starter Kit is a useful tool to help you have the conversation with a family member, friend, or other loved one about your – or their – wishes regarding end-of-life care. It is available in several languages.  All of the Starter Kits are available to download and print for free.

To purchase printed copies of the Starter Kits, print in bulk or add your logo and contact information,  visit our Mimeo Marketplace

If you know someone who would benefit from receiving this newsletter, have them register here .