Partners in Palliative Care: Enhancing Ethics in Care at the End-of-Life

The Collaborative for Palliative Care is a grassroots consortium of public and private organizations that came together in 2005 to work toward improving education for community members and professionals practicing in palliative care in the Hudson Valley Region of New York State. Over a period of 6 years, the Collaborative grew from a small fledgling group to a large advocacy organization of roughly 50 organizational members. The mission of the Collaborative is improving education, research and advocacy in palliative and end-of-life care. The work of the Collaborative has moved beyond the Hudson Valley region to the New York State Southern Region and includes most of the major hospitals, home care agencies and hospices in the region. This book examines specific areas of concern that the Collaborative has addressed in its advocacy, as well as the collaborative processes that have been so successful in building community assets. Areas of concentration have been diverse and include advance care planning, relational communication paradigms, the role of culture and spirituality in palliative care, the meaning of pain and suffering for seriously ill individuals, and the ethics of health care costs in palliative and end of life systems of care. The book also describes how the Collaborative is bridging policy, research and practice in its initiatives and vision for the future. Central focuses of the book are community capacity building, ethical decision making and interdisciplinary collaboration to improve palliative systems of care. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Social Work in End-of-Life and Palliative Care.