By Holly Vossel
A deadly worldwide pandemic has helped to expose pitfalls in a broken health care system, drawing increased awareness and attention around the delivery of serious illness and end-of-life care, according to hospice and palliative care experts speaking at End Well’s Take 10 virtual conference.
The virus has claimed more than 1.6 million lives globally since its onset, according to a recent World Health Organization report which stated that the United States continues to bear the brunt of the pandemic’s effects, accounting for 86% of new deaths worldwide in the last week alone. According to a number of health care stakeholders, the government and the health care system itself hasn’t sufficiently adapted to meet patients’ needs during the crisis.
“We’ve been putting our elderly and disabled in solitary confinement for months, and that was understandable during the first few weeks where we didn’t understand anything about the virus or how to keep people safe. We saw entire units where elderly people and disabled people died, but now we know how to keep people safe,” said Atul Gawande, M.D., a surgeon, writer and public health leader, at the End Well event. “I myself have family with serious health issues and they need long term care, but we’re told we have to sign away the possibility that we’d ever see them again, that we’d ever hug them again and that’s just unacceptable. They won’t provide the [personal protective equipment (PPE)] and the training to make such things as possible, and that is outrageous.”
Gawande is founder and chair of Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation, and of Lifebox, a nonprofit organization aimed at making surgery safer globally. He is also co-founder of the Massachusetts Serious Illness Care Coalition and serves as board chairman of Haven Healthcare. Gawande is among the providers calling for fundamental changes to the health care system.
A key component of that change would be to promote end-of-life and goals-of-care conversations among patients and families. Gawande cited surveys conducted by the Massachusetts Serious Illness Care Coalition, an organization he founded, which indicated that only about 50% of people who have a serious health condition have discussed their wishes with their loved ones. Only 25% have had such conversations with their clinicians.
“When they have those conversations they’re not at all confident that those wishes will be followed. That should be an outrage,” Gawande said.
COVID-19 has disrupted the health care system as providers faced lack of protective resources, staffing issues and revenue losses. Hospices have been pummeled by the disease’s spread, taking hits to operations and finances and facing difficulty accessing facility- and community-based patients.
Some of the roadblocks to quality end-of-life and serious illness care often stem from social determinants of health, lack of awareness around hospice care, and racial divides in accessible care. While these issues are gradually coming to the forefront of discussions in the end-of-life space among clinical, business and policy leaders, stakeholders are renewing calls to accelerate a reorientation of the health care system towards patient-centered, goal-concordant care.
“We all deserve a system that we’re not just tolerating,” said Mark Ganz, president and CEO of Cambia Health Solutions at the End Well Take 10 event. “Let’s resolve as we accelerate out of this curve called 2020 that we take some of the difficult things we’ve seen and talked about and we turn it into a thing of light. We have the opportunity to invent the systems that allow us to truly see the patients and their loved ones in a new way. We need to act and act now.”
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