What if you discovered a drug that could make patients feel better, improve the quality of the care they got, was aligned with what they wanted, was cheap, and had essentially no side effects? You would think people would be beating down the walls to get their hands on it. We would see TV ads every few minutes with all the best looking scenery and people. Everyone would be talking about it.
We have just such a drug, but it is not a pill; It is called supportive care.
OSF HealthCare began the supportive care journey in 2005, in response to unmet patient and family needs. Since then, inpatient palliative care services and advance care planning have begun in every region served by OSF. The road has sometimes been rocky, but we have kept moving forward and will continue to do so.
One of the key problems faced in health care systems today is that they don’t really understand what supportive care or palliative care is. Many equate it with hospice. While hospice is a part of palliative care, palliative care is so much more. We have been challenged to educate our physicians, patients, and staff about this important program, and to assist us in that effort, we began a weekly email series two years ago called “Supportive Care Connections.”
This email has been generally well-received and we have purposely kept it short and light, but directed readers where to go for more information. That way, they could read it quickly and decide what more they needed to find out, and get the information they need. We weren’t Twitter; we didn’t keep it to 140 characters, but we usually tried to keep it to seven lines or less.
We plan to continue to develop the weekly Supportive Care Connections email for our internal audience, but will be posting the information here on this blog, along with other articles, stories, anecdotes, resources, news, and more. We hope this is educational and fun to read. Please help us by joining in the discussion and feel free to pass along the information you see here to anyone you know.
Join us on this journey… it might just change your life!
Last Updated: April 4, 2022