COMMUNITY PARTNERS AT WORK

Honoring Choices Massachusetts “went live” a year ago, give or take a week. Coincidentally, that very same week, the New York Times ran a story under the headline: “Panel Urges Overhauling Health Care at End of Life.” We say “coincidentally” because as much as we’d like to believe that our platform drives the NYTimes health-care-planning reporter’s agenda, more likely it does not. However, the article, discussing a new report, Dying In America  issued by The Institute of Medicine, validates the person centered work done by Honoring Choices  Community Partners and about which we’ve had the opportunity to write over the course of the year.

On that basis – validating our Community Partners’ very good work – the article and the IMO’s Report excites us very much. In addition, a week later WBUR’s On Point program presented an excellent discussion of the report, including as Panel guests, David Walker, co-chair of the Institute of Medicine’s Committee on Aging, and former Comptroller General of the United States.

This discussion brings home the most central aspect of Honoring Choices’ platform where David Walker maintains that:  “Quality, compassionate care is about honoring individual choices using a lifecycle approach,”   which he explained as “having discussions early with family and with primary care physicians” about your care, and at “major milestones all through your  life.” As he said, “If you are honoring individual choices, you have better health care and more compassion…and better quality care. ”

As Walker noted, “the report focuses on 3 major areas to improve quality care and honor individual choices:”

• What individuals can do to take control of their care all through their lives, and at the end of life;
• What changes are needed to enhance quality of services by clinicians;
• What changes are necessary by policy makers and payment systems.

All of that said, there remains one thing about the NYT article, however, that we really do have to critique, and that’s the photograph that the editors unfortunately chose to run with the piece. We say “unfortunate” because out of the entire universe of images that might have been chosen, this one happened to be of an especially dour-faced couple sitting across a table from someone who’s holding a pen hovering over an impliedly intimidating stack of papers, presumably filling them out for the very unhappy couple.

We simply cannot help being reactive to such misplaced negativity as expressed by that photo. Good quality health care is best achieved by engaging adults, throughout their lifetimes, in early and ongoing discussions and enabling adults to direct their choices for care; and not by focusing on one end of life conversation, or achieved by wading through an intimidating stack of complicated documents.  Just ask our Community Partners.