During her serious illness, Alesha made new friends, repaired family relationships,
and got married. While hospitalized for a life-threatening medical condition,
she and her loved ones reclaimed a rich part of their lives.
These healing experiences are increasingly common within Providence St.
Joseph Health ministries and practices, under the auspices of whole person
care and in harmony with population health programs.
The Providence Institute for Human Caring seeks to create a culture of
whole person care by bringing the tenets of palliative care across all
care settings to all patients and their loved ones.
In focusing on the values, preferences and priorities of whole persons,
rather than just diagnoses and treatments, we are concerned about how
people feel – physically, emotionally and spiritually – about
their level of function and independence, and about the well-being of
those they love.
Whole person care ripples out from the focus on the individual, and touches
families and communities. While we think of medical care as being encounter-based,
it actually travels in time to the future. To minimize grief, say, when
someone has end-stage liver disease or cancer, we tend to the emotional,
spiritual and psychological well-being of the person in our care and their
loved ones. We’re applying a healing balm that transcends a single
medical episode.
By focusing on the whole person and the well-being of their loved ones,
we can help replace unresolved grief with a sense of accomplishment and
satisfaction.
In caring for people such as Alesha as a whole person, we can bring the
best medical science to bear for her medical condition. But she has feelings
and friends and people who matter to her. She lives in a community. And
if she gets medically worse, her quality of life will live within her
loved ones for a long time to come.
Whole person care means giving Alesha the best care we possibly can. And
it also means her family gets care in their grief when she does leave
this life.
In making it easy to have conversations about a person’s goals of
care, we’re making sure health care is highly personalized, and
not applying a one-size-fits-all model. We’re making sure that people’s
cultural background, ethnic and religious values, and even personal idiosyncrasies
are honored within a truly personalized style of care.
Whole person care and population health are concerned about the well-being
of families and communities – about primary prevention (of injury
and illness) and secondary prevention – of complications of those
who are already ill – as well as adverse impacts of illness on family
caregivers and close relatives.
Both are concerned about social determinants of health – their housing,
diet, exercise, environmental quality, how they get from place to place
– because all of these also matter to individual and family well-being.
Our patients don’t live in doctor’s offices or hospitals. They
live in a community. So, in taking care of whole persons, we are taking
care of people in the context of their families and their communities.