Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Bedside Advocates

The Bedside Advocacy initiative will recruit retired physicians, nurses, social workers and experienced lay persons to serve as volunteer advocates and facilitators for high-risk patients. Individual bedside advocates will serve only a few patients on a one-on-one basis. Each patient will be followed to all sites where healthcare is delivered, including his or her home. The main idea is to stay in touch and be available at all times, when needed.

Why is the Bedside Advocacy project necessary? Because healthcare in America today is bewildering, anxiety-provoking, fragmented, often inaccessible and, yes, at times, uncaring. All of this despite, almost always, the well-intentioned efforts of physicians, nurses and other staff to the contrary. 

The Bedside Advocacy initiative is designed to put caring back into healthcare and help patients and families cope with these and other problems. With a trained advocate at bedside, or in an ambulatory setting, the fragmentation of care will diminish, patient safety and the quality of care will be enhanced, and the costs of healthcare and hospitalizations will be reduced. Interviews with ordinary people have convinced us that there is enthusiastic public support for this service. Similarly, we believe that healthcare institutions and providers will find significant advantages in their own pursuit of higher levels of patient satisfaction, safety and improved quality of care. To back up these convictions, proper studies embedded in pilot and demonstration projects will be carried out to prove the utility of this project, as well as rigorous evaluations.

Several retired physicians, nurses, social workers, other health professionals and experienced lay persons have expressed interest in serving as volunteer bedside advocates. Phase I will focus on recruitment of a few of these individuals in a pilot project in Eastern Massachusetts. The Bedside Advocate's Creed conveys in a robust way the spirit and role of the advocate.

Many leading specialists in patient safety and the quality of care have helped in refinement of the Bedside Advocacy project. Bedside advocates will not practice medicine. They will, however, get to know those they serve thoroughly and facilitate prompt communication with the healthcare team when asked to do so by the patient or the family. Confidentiality agreements will be binding on all volunteers, in line with current healthcare practice.

More ...

http://web.mac.com/jonathanfine/Bedside_Advocates/Introduction.html


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