Nursing Home Education

The Coalition for Compassionate Care of California promotes quality, compassionate end-of-life care for California’s nursing home residents. CCCC assists facilities in creating and implementing end-of-life practices that benefit residents and their loved ones.

Nursing Home Projects:

CARE Recommendations
PREPARED Project
ECHO Recommendations
Promising Practices

CARE Recommendations

Compassion and Respect at the End-of-Life

The CARE Recommendations guide nursing homes in increasing their capacity to provide compassionate, quality end-of-life care that is consistent with residents’ wishes. The Recommendations contain tools and resources that support the development of the attitudes, knowledge and skills nursing homes need to provide the best possible end-of-life care for residents.

The CARE Recommendations will assist nursing homes in:

Facilitating conversations with residents and family members to clarify residents’ goals of care and specify their care preferences,
Providing care that addresses resident’s physical needs, while also honoring their emotional, psycho-social, and spiritual needs,
Establishing processes and rituals that acknowledge the sacredness of the human spirit in residents, family members and staff, and
Creating a culture in which a resident’s individual needs and preferences are known and honored.

The CARE Recommendations were developed collaboratively with the California Culture Change Coalition and funded by the California HealthCare Foundation.

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PREPARED Project

Preparing Residents for End-of-life Plans and Respecting End-of-life Decisions

The PREPARED project established collaboration between four hospital systems and 18 Sacramento-area nursing homes to improve advance care planning and reduce unnecessary transfers for residents with advanced chronic illnesses.

Through PREPARED, over 1,000 nursing home staff were educated on end-of-life issues, goals of care, symptom management and advance care planning. Key nursing home staff received mentoring and role modeling in facilitating advance care planning discussions with nursing home residents and family members.

This project was funded by the California HealthCare Foundation.

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ECHO Recommendations

Extreme Care, Humane Options: ECHO Nursing Facility Recommendations
January 2000

The ECHO Nursing Facility Recommendations [PDF] were designed to improve end-of-life care for nursing home residents by enhancing the advance care planning process and palliative care services. The recommendations clearly focused attention on the resident’s role in the end-of-life decision-making process while ensuring end-of-life care honors resident wishes. The recommendations also proposed changes to administrative and clinical practices that addressed existing barriers to end-of-life care.

The ECHO Recommendations were the foundation for a nursing home end-of-life care training program. As part of the program, leadership teams from throughout California developed and implemented end-of-life care practices for their own facility.

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Promising Practices

Through our Promising Practices initiative, the Coalition for Compassionate Care of California worked with a small group of California nursing facilities that were excelling in some aspect of end-of-life care, to provide technical assistance and mentoring to refine these practices into replicable models that can be adopted by other nursing facilities in the state and nationally. Find out more [PDF] about these models.

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