A Key to Health System Transformation

Description

Despite most patients’ preferences to die at home among their loved ones, many with end-stage cancer, heart failure, and other advanced illnesses spend their last days in the hospital. Many clinicians resist telling patients that treatments are not working or that their prognosis is poor, fearful of destroying their hopes for cure. Difficult but honest and needed conversations about patients’ prognosis can be blocked by an unrealistic view of hope focused solely on cure. But, as cure becomes less likely, a new type of hope can evolve. Skilled clinicians can nurture this intrinsic hope for quality of life and meaning by providing honest and realistic insights so that patients can clarify their care preferences and formulate effective end-of-life care plans. This approach, which can improve patients’ wellbeing and reduce caregiver burden and stress, is central to a “moonshot” goal, recently launched by the Coalition to Transform Advanced Care (C-TAC), to ensure that millions of people with serious illness have a high quality of life by 2030.

At this event, innovators, thought leaders, and advocates explored the nature, dynamics, and management of hope in the context of advanced illness and end-of-life care. The discussion focused on creating a foundation for future work, including communication tools to inform clinicians and foster wider awareness of the nature and dynamics of hope, contributing to an exploration of ways to implement, test, and disseminate novel tools and strategies nationally to improve care for the growing population of patients with advanced illness.

Panelists

Discussion Topics

Panelists addressed topics including:

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Part of the Project on Advanced Care and Health Policy, a collaboration between the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School and the Coalition to Transform Advanced Care (C-TAC), a non-partisan, non-profit alliance of over 130 national organizations dedicated to being a catalyst to change the health delivery system, empower consumers, enhance provider capacity, and improve public and private policies in advanced illness care.