Focus on Bereavement Camps for Children and Adolescents

Comfort Zone Camp, which serves grieving children ages 7-17, was highlighted earlier this month on NBC's Today show. The three-day programs are run year-round in five states.




ESPN recently highlighted Camp Erin, a bereavement camp run by the Moyer Foundation. Camp Erin has 36 camps in 23 states and one in Canada, serving children ages 6-17.



If you're looking to find a bereavement camp in your area, try using the Finding Support map maintained by the National Alliance for Grieving Children.

If you're a professional looking to learn more about bereavement camps, watch HFA's on-demand webinar, "Bereavement Camps for Kids: Benefits and Challenges," available through January 31, 2011. If you already run a camp, this webinar will reaffirm and review the most current information and best practices. If your organization is considering starting a camp, this webinar will be a great place to explore this new and viable approach to serving the bereaved youth of your community.

Hospice Foundation of America has funded exceptional programs for bereaved children for the past two years. See our 2009 grant recipients and the recipients from our 2010 program which focused on teens.

Study Shows Early Palliative Care Can Extend Lives

End-of-life care treatment can make a tremendous difference in a patient's quality of life. A study of 151 patients with advanced lung cancer were divided in to two groups; one group began receiving palliative care immediately upon diagnosis, the other did not, and the differences in their outcomes were striking. Patients receiving palliative care reported less pain, less depression, and more mobility. Although the palliative care patients frequently requested fewer aggressive treatments, they also lived nearly three months longer than patients receiving standard treatments.

The study, published online last Wednesday by The New England Journal of Medicine, has received large media coverage. The New York Times, Associated Press, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, have written articles about the study. Many health related blogs, such as Pallimed, GeriPal, Dr. Len's Cancer blog (American Cancer Society), and New Health Dialogue are posting about what this study means to the field of palliative care. The study was the topic of this morning’s The Diane Rehm Show on NPR, and included guests Dr. Diane Meier (director of the Center to Advance Palliative Care) and Dr. Atul Gawande (author of a recent piece on end-of-life care in the New Yorker.)

This recent study is not the first to show a longevity benefit with hospice and palliative care. In 2007, a study of nearly 4,500 deceased Medicare beneficiaries showed that patients with common life-limiting conditions lived 29 days longer, on average, when they received hospice care.

An editorial by Amy S. Kelley, M.D., M.S.H.S. and Diane E. Meier, M.D. also accompanied the study.

Eldercare Notes - August 2010

• Milt Freudenheim writes in the New York Times about efforts to prepare for the growth in the number of elderly patients expected in the United States in coming years.
  

  With a nudge from the new health care law and pressure from Medicare, hospitals, doctors and nurses are struggling to prepare for explosive growth in the numbers of high-risk elderly patients.
  
  More than 40 percent of adult patients in acute care hospital beds are 65 or older. Seventy million Americans will have turned 65 by 2030. They include the 85-and-older cohort, the nation’s fastest-growing age group.
  
  Elderly people often have multiple chronic illnesses, expensive to treat, and they are apt to require costly hospital readmissions, sometimes as often as 10 times in a single year.

• The Washington Post reports that $159.1 million in government grants will be given to educational programs that train nurses and geriatric specialists.

• At U.S. News & World Report, Catherine Arnst reports on accountable care organizations and their emerging role in patient care. The article discusses the care one elderly patient receives, including house calls. Paula Span writes about other programs that include house calls on the New Old Age blog.

• In the New York Times, Hilary Stoudt discusses different monitoring technologies that are designed to help seniors remain in their homes longer.

Caregiving Notes - August 2010

• On the New Old Age blog, Paula Span describes how neighbors sometimes step in to provide assistance to an aging community member in "The Caregiver Next Door." Although such assistance is not likely to show up on standard measurements of caregiving, Span writes, it can be vital to letting seniors 'age in place.'

• The July/August 2010 edition of Harvard Magazine included a feature on caregiving by anthropology professor, Arthur Kleinman. He discusses the role of caregiving as a moral activity.

• The 2010 winners of the National Family Caregiving Awards were recently announced. The awards, sponsored by the National Alliance for Caregiving with support from MetLife Foundation, recognize programs for "their innovation, effectiveness, and response to caregiver needs in their communities."

Teen Writes Book to Help Others with Grief

The Toronto Sun shares the story of Jerome Biroo, whose mother died when he was ten years old. Jerome went on to write the book Chances: A Teen Reshapes His Life After the Death of a Parent after he spent years struggling with the loss. He hopes the book makes a difference for other children who are dealing with the death of a parent. The book will be released in September; read an excerpt here.

This year HFA is highlighting the needs of grieving children and adolescents with a three-part webinar series. The webinars feature some of the best-known names in the field and professionals who work with grieving children and adolescents every day.

• “Bereavement Camps for Kids: Benefits and Challenges” archived, on-demand program through January 31, 2011.
  Panelists will include: Sherry Schachter, Director of Calvary Hospital’s annual bereavement camp in New York; Angela Hamblen, Director of Camp Good Grief in Tennessee; Bonnie Carroll, Executive Director of TAPS, which offers support to those suffering the loss of a military loved one; and Lesa Linster, National Camp Erin Project Director at The Moyer Foundation.
• “Bereaved Children and Adolescents: Lessons from Research” archived, on-demand program through April 13, 2011.
  Panelists will include J. William Worden, a co-principal investigator for the Harvard Child Bereavement Study and Irwin N. Sandler, Regent’s Professor of Psychology, Arizona State University.
• “Grieving Children and Adolescents: The Role of Internet Support” archived, on-demand program through June 14, 2011.
  Panelists include Pamela Gabbay of the Mourning Star Center and Natl. Alliance for Grieving Children and Carla Sofka, associate professor of social work at Siena College in New York. The panel will also be joined by Michelle Hernandez, who will discuss her own experience with loss as a teenager, and how she utilized the Internet as part of her journey through grief.

Register for all three webinars here.

End-of-Life Care in the ER

Joanne Kenen of the New America Foundation writes in Slate about the challenge of providing end-of-life care in an Emergency Department setting, where some patients first learn of their fatal illness, and others aren’t told that the chronic disease they’ve been living with is now slowly killing them.

The ER is not an easy place to come to these realizations or assess their consequences. A handful of physicians are trying to change that. Doctors like Tammie Quest, board-certified in both palliative and emergency medicine, hope to bring the deliberative goal-setting, symptom-controlling ethos of palliative care into the adrenaline-charged, "tube 'em and move 'em" ER. Palliative/emergency medicine collaboration remains rare, but it's growing as both fields seek to create a more "patient-centered" approach to emergency care for the seriously ill or the dying, to improve symptom management, enhance family support, and ensure that the patient understands the likely outcomes once they get on that high-tech conveyer belt of 21^st-century emergency medicine.

Kenen addresses comments her article received about the ER and primary care in this New Health Dialogue blog post.

Cost of End-of-Life Care Examined Again on 60 Minutes

CBS News' 60 Minutes program recently updated a November 2009 story examining the cost of end-of-life care in the United States. The program included interviews with Dr. Elliott Fisher, Director of the Center for Health Policy Research at Dartmouth and Dr. Ira Byock, Director of Palliative Medicine at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center.

Survey Reveals over Half of Americans Voice their End-of-Life Care Preferences

A survey of more than 3,000 U.S. households showed that 57 percent of Americans have shared their end-of-life care preferences with others, either through informal communication or more formally through a living will or healthcare power of attorney. Older Americans (those over 65) were more likely to use formal methods.

The survey, which is conducted annually, also found that 10 percent of those surveyed had made a medical decision for another person in the previous year. Half of those received counseling from a support group or healthcare professional and eighty percent said such counseling was helpful.

Read the summary here.

How Much Grief is Okay?

Monday's Morning Edition program on NPR included a segment on grief. The segment addressed a proposed change to the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders that would remove what is know as a "bereavement exclusion" in diagnosing patients with depression for patients whose loved one has recently died.

The idea was that feelings of intense pain were normal, so they shouldn't be labeled as a mental disorder.

But the new DSM changes this. Buried in the pages is a small but potentially potent alteration that has implications not only for people like Theresa, but ultimately for the way that we think about and understand the emotion of pain.

The DSM committee removed the bereavement exclusion — a small, almost footnote at the bottom of the section that describes the symptoms of major depression — from the manual.

NPR's Alix Spiegel delves in to how doctors differentiate between grief and depression. Viewpoints from Dr. Kenneth Kendler, a member of the committee recommending the change, and Holly Prigerson, a Harvard University researcher who questions the change, are included.

For more resources, see the Grief section of HFA's website.

August 2010 Palliative Care Grand Rounds

The August edition of Palliative Care Grand Rounds for 2010, a "monthly blog carnival" highlighting blog posts related to hospice and palliative care, is up at
Confessions of a Young (Looking) Social Worker blog.

Thanks for hosting PCGR!

HFA Supports Grieving Teens with 2010 Grants Program

We are pleased to announce the recipients of HFA's 2010 Grants to Support Grieving Adolescents. This year, we focused on finding programs specifically geared towards teenagers.

“HFA is pleased to be able to offer support to programs that are doing such vital work to support grieving young people,” said Amy Tucci, President and CEO of Hospice Foundation of America. “Grieving adolescents often have more challenges in finding support; many programs are geared either more to younger children or to older adults. The programs we funded show a true understanding of the needs of adolescents.” The grant recipients were selected by a panel of well-known experts in children’s bereavement, including Charles Corr, PhD and Kenneth Doka, PhD, MDiv.

They are:

• Hospice of Santa Cruz County in Scotts Valley, CA received $10,000 to support a new school-based outreach model intended to more effectively reach and serve Latino teens, using the H.U.G. (Health Understanding of Grief) Program. The Hospice of Santa Cruz County identified low participation of Latino teens in the teen grief groups conducted at their facility. After doing informal research, staff discovered some impediments teens have to attending, such as the lack of reliable transportation and after-school responsibilities. By meeting in the schools during the school day, the Hospice of Santa Cruz County aims to increase the involvement of Latino teens in their grief programs.

• Hospice of Wake County in Raleigh, NC received $1,000 to support Across the Continuum, a new after-school support program for young people with chronically ill parents. The first and only program of its kind in Wake County, this program will support 200 young people annually across the continuum of their parent’s disease—from seriously to terminally ill and finally to death.

• Mesilla Valley Hospice in Las Cruces, NM received $1,000 to support the provision of grief counseling services to the Hatch Valley Municipal School District’s middle and high schools. The grant will be used to help revise Mesilla Valley Hospice's curriculum and transform it into a multi-cultural/bilingual grief program which incorporates Mexican traditions into the grief work.

A primary mission of Hospice Foundation of America (www.hospicefoundation.org ) is to provide the most current thinking and information on grief and bereavement to healthcare professionals and laypeople. “It is an important mission of Hospice Foundation of America to renew its commitment to supporting hospice and bereavement programs nationwide, through funding and education” said Tucci. HFA accomplishes this mission through a wide range of educational programs, including its annual National Bereavement Teleconference, as well as publications and online information.

Support HFA's mission, by making a donation today.