The Palliative Care Program at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center, consisting of an interprofessional team of clinicians and researchers from Bayview and Johns Hopkins Schools of Nursing, Public Health, and Medicine, received the 2023 Circle of Life Award from the American Hospital Association. Given for excellence in innovation, this award is the highest honor a palliative care program can win in the U.S.
The Palliative Care Program at Bayview takes an approach that combines palliative care with social justice to optimize quality of life by preventing and relieving suffering.
“This interprofessional team created a groundbreaking structure that centers an individual, their family and community in decisions about their care,” says JHSON Dean Sarah Szanton, PhD, RN, FAAN. “That is a novel inclusive model that drives person-centered results.”
The Circle of Life award particularly highlighted two patient-focused contributions: the Palliative Interprofessional Collaborative for Action Research (PICAR) team and the 3-Act Model. The 3-Act Model is a narrative approach to the goals-of-care conversation, consisting of the patient’s story, medical opinion, and shared decisions that was designed by the Bayview Palliative Care team. The conceptual framework that anchors PICAR’s work is described in “A Call to Action to Address Disparities in Palliative Care Access: A Conceptual Framework for Individualizing Care Needs.” The team has several ongoing projects that utilize community codesign to improve care for diverse patients and their families; they are funded by the Cambia Health Foundation Sojourns Scholar Leadership Award, the Rita and Alex Hillman Foundation, Johns Hopkins Institute for Excellence in Education, and the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing Discovery and Innovation Award.
The interprofessional team at PICAR consists of Rebecca Wright, PhD, BSC (Hons), RN, Janiece Taylor, PhD, RN, FAAN, and Natalie Regier, PhD, Assistant Professors at the School of Nursing; David S. Wu, MD, Director of Palliative Care at Bayview and Associate Professor at the School of Medicine; Danetta Sloan, PhD, Associate Professor at the School of Public Health; and Ashley Booth, MSN, who is Research Program and Clinical Nurse Coordinator, and a 2020 graduate of the MSN (Entry Into Nursing) program.
The Circle of Life award also valued how the Palliative Care Team balanced PICAR’s patient-focused contribution by including Thrive by Design, which addresses staff wellness at the system, team, and personal levels.
“Our model is effective at focusing on the person and able to maintain compassion through partnerships across schools, professions, and community to build something helpful, powerful, and kind,” says Dr. Rebecca Wright. “We see codesign partnerships as a thoughtful way of responding to the challenges in our health care systems.”
The American Hospital Association presented the Palliative Care Team’s award Tuesday, October 24, 2023, before the team presented their work in a Johns Hopkins Medicine Grand Rounds at the Bayview Medical Center.
Featured photo credit: Brittany Dunbar
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Located in Baltimore, the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing is a globally-recognized leader in nursing education, research, and practice. In U.S. News & World Report rankings, the school is No. 1 nationally for its DNP program and No. 2 for its master’s. In addition, JHSON is ranked as the No. 3 nursing school in the world by QS World University. The school is a five-time recipient of the INSIGHT Into Diversity Health Professions Higher Education Excellence in Diversity (HEED) Award and a four-time Best School for Men in Nursing award recipient. For more information, visit www.nursing.jhu.edu.
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