For Healthcare Professionals

The Institute for Human Caring offers physicians, nurses, social workers, chaplains, case managers and others continuing education and advanced training to support whole person care.

The Institute’s provider education portfolio emphasizes ongoing communication, goals-of-care clarification, and shared decision-making, as well as pain and symptom management.

For more information, contact HumanCaring@providence.org or call (424) 212-5400.

Resources for Healthcare Professionals

Advance Care Planning

Advance Care Planning is a process which could include completing one or more of the following:

Advance Directive: A legal document that an individual completes in advance that indicates the kind of care they would want if they were in an accident or were to become seriously ill. In addition, an advance directive allows an individual to name an agent or surrogate that can make health care decisions on their behalf in the event they can’t speak for themselves. Link to Advance Directives by state.
Trusted Decision Maker: At most Providence locations, patients with decision-making capacity can now verbally designate a trusted decision maker for documentation in their health record. A trusted decision maker note is not a legal document. It does not take place of state laws. Download sample Trusted Decision Maker
Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment (POLST): A physician order that outlines a plan of care reflecting a patient’s wishes concerning care at life’s end.
Goals of Care Conversation: A conversation with patients facing serious illness. The Institute for Human Caring provides Advanced Communication Training to all clinicians who want to talk to patients about their goals, preferences, and priorities.

Advanced Communication Training

Advanced Communication Training

This 2 ½ hour interactive training program fills a significant gap for clinicians who seek to improve communication with patients with serious illness and to implement the Serious Illness Conversation Guide (SICG) as a tool to facilitate ‘Goals of Care’ conversations in their practice. During the training, clinicians learn skills to develop a personalized care plan for patients and families living with serious illness. To join or schedule a training at your site, email humancaring@providence.org

ACP Decisions

Advance Care Planning (ACP) Decisions

Video “prescriptions” for clinicians to help foster meaningful and sometimes difficult conversations with patients. Providence clinicians can access these videos for free by clicking here. Select the folder for your state to access a site-specific username and password.

CAPC

Center to Advance Palliative Care

Providence caregivers have free access to more than 45 CME/CEU-certified courses. Courses range in topics from Advance Care Planning Conversations to Pain Management. To create an account go to https://www.capc.org/, select the name of your ministry, and using your work email address, create a username and password.

Get to Know Me

Free posters to help improve caregiver/patient engagement and deliver patients from anonymity.

Download horizontal English poster

Download vertical English poster

Download Spanish poster

Serious Illness Care in the EHR Toolkit

These resources include our webinar, slide decks from the webinar, a descriptive paper of the design principles, and a checklist of potential activities to pursue.

Webinar: We recommend anyone reviewing these resources begin by watching our webinar and using the included slide decks for reference and note taking. The webinar was recorded live on February 16th, 2023 by Drs. Matthew Gonzales and Deborah Unger. Link to webinar

Design Principles Slide Deck: A copy of the slides used in the webinar for reference, note taking, and printing. CHCF Top 10 Brief

Informatics Pitch Slide Deck: A copy of the recommended strategies and tips for presenting an informatics project to the IT and/or analytics team at your institution. CHCF Pitch Deck Design Principles Paper: An in-depth paper of the top 10 design principles discussed in the webinar. This includes the examples of projects, time estimates for completion, and additional tips and considerations for implementation. This paper can be used for reference, or for dissemination to other colleagues for education, discussion, or informal white paper on the subject of Serious Illness Informatics. Top Design Principles for Serious Illness Care Informatics

Checklist: A list of actionable project ideas and “to-do’s” for individuals, teams, and departments to consider implementing. Checklist for Serious Illness Care Informatics

Additional Resources

Some additional resources are discussed in the webinar, but for other questions or for ongoing discussion, please reach out to us at humancaring@providence.org.

For California programs: We are pleased to be offering 1:1 virtual sessions with our Director of Informatics to discuss any informatics topics of interest to to. These are available through June 2023, and generously supported by the California Health Care Foundation, Topics could include implementation of any of the tools or projects discussed in the webinar, paper, or checklist, or talking through current hurdles in your EHR affecting quality serious illness care. Please complete this form if interested: