Make Your Wishes Known/POLST
Make Your Wishes Known and POLST
End-of-life care comprises the most significant investment of our nation's health care dollars, and it often entails extreme forms of treatment that a patient may not even want. HIP is partnering on two projects to ensure that individuals are treated in accordance with their end-of-life wishes.
Make Your Wishes Known, an initiative jointly sponsored by the Health Improvement Partnership, Hospice of Santa Cruz County and the Santa Cruz County End-of-Life Coalition, works through community educators, physicians and others to disseminate a simple but critical message: complete an Advance Directive (English and Spanish) to make your health care wishes known for your own sake, and for the sake of your loved ones.
The project has helped disseminate thousands of referral cards about how and why community members should complete their Advance Directive, as well as worked with Hospice and the End-of-Life Coalition on trainings for community groups, families, and local businesses about the importance of the forms. Contact Hospice for more information or to schedule a training.
HIP is also working with Hospice and the County of Santa Cruz Emergency Medical Services to establish Physicians Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment (POLST). POLST became law in California on January 1, 2009. It is a standardized form designed to convert wishes for life-sustaining treatments into medical orders. POLST was created to ensure that treatment wishes are honored in the event that a patient/resident is unable to speak for himself or herself, particularly for those facing serious or life-threatening illnesses.
The goal of our local POLST project is to provide training and consultations for local physicians and emergency workers, and to incorporate best practices from other states who have implemented POLST.
