The Moore Foundation’s Patient Care Program is currently exploring opportunities to improve the experience and outcomes of people with multiple chronic conditions (think heart disease, diabetes) and functional limitations, including those who may be later stage in life or even nearing end-of-life.
As part of our efforts in this area, we have identified the need to improve the public’s understanding of the issues that arise for this particular patient population. For example, decisions people need to make about the kind of care they want, who should be their health care proxy, and the purpose and importance of an advanced directive. If you are not familiar with the latter, you are not alone (learn about it here). Many Americans are unfamiliar with certain essential health care forms and as a result do not know how they can and should be used. Moreover, people generally do not have conversations about how they want to live a good life and be cared for throughout until it is far too late, often leaving family members grappling with tough decisions. Learn more about how to start with the help of The Conversation Project.
There are a multitude of ways to enhance public understanding – through organizations, advocates, health care professionals and the media – and each plays an important part. Journalists in particular have enormous power to inform and influence the national discussion so the foundation has made a grant to the Henry J Kaiser Family Foundation to examine and write about a wide range of issues and innovations on this topic. Articles are written by and published through its Kaiser Health News (KHN), a nonprofit news service committed to in-depth coverage of health care policy and reporting on how the health care system (hospitals, doctors, nurses, insurers, governments, consumers) works.
We’ll periodically showcase articles generated by KHN reporters in an effort to help with public education. Articles supported by the foundation, along with other foundations interested in related topics, including The John A. Hartford and The SCAN Foundation, can be found under the category titled "Aging" on the KHN website.
Message sent
Thank you for sharing.