End-of-Life Care in Age Friendly Communities

This assignment focuses on integrating end-of-life care into existing Age Friendly Communities programs. It outlines the need for specialist staff, technology integration, collaboration with public health organizations, advanced care planning, and staff resilience training to effectively address the end-of-life needs of elderly patients within these programs.

Running head: HEALTH AND WELL BEING
Health and well being in older people
Name of the student:
Name of the University:
Author’s note

1HEALTH AND WELL-BEING
Exercise 5.1: Amendments needed in Age Friendly Communities program to incorporate
end-of-life issues and concerns
Age Friendly Communities programs have mostly paid attention to addressing the issues of
older adults in the community and enhance the opportunities to age-friendly development. The
success of such programs is just dependent on how safe, effective and inclusive care is provided
to elderly. However, one area that they have ignored is the services related to addressing the end
of life issues and concerns of elderly clients. To incorporate end of life issues and concerns, the
age friendly community programs need to amend the following:
 They need to include specialist staffs who are trained in palliative care and understand the
demands of the end-of-life service.
 As age friendly community programs may not be competent in providing all care
provisions needed at end of life, they need to incorporate both technology as well as right
skills mix to easily handle patients with deteriorating health issues.
 As age friendly communities collaborate with different public health organization to
provide support to elderly, one important service direction to introduce end-of-life care
would be to create knowledge of end-of-life care throughout public health organization
and other partnering organization. This will support planning and delivery of end-of life
care and ensure that supporting service or resources for end-of-life care is readily
available (Kamal et al., 2014).
 Another important amendment is that advanced care planning and initiation of end-of-life
care is needed to effectively respond to the needs of patients throughout their suffering
and meet all clinical safety and quality standards. Advance care planning has the potential
to both inform and empower patients to understand their current and future treatment.

2HEALTH AND WELL-BEING
Some of the important components of advanced care planning include having clear idea
about patients understanding about illness, their values, beliefs and wishes. As this is a
challenging process, trained staffs in palliative care will be required in age-friendly
community programs to support advanced care planning (Detering et al., 2010).
 To deliver high quality end-of-life care, the established clinical safety and quality
standards also needs to be amended. Making changes in this area is important because
majority of deterioration in health of patients in hospitals occurs because patients do not
receive appropriate care according to their immediate health needs. Hence, establishing
system and structures for delivering safe and high quality end-of-life care will be
important for age friendly community programs (Bainbridge et al., 2016).
 As the work of caring for patients with serious illness is a challenging job that affects
clinicians and other staffs psychologically, focusing on factors to prevent burnout in
staffs is also critical to improve the quality of end-of-life care. The resilience skill of
staffs needs to be amended according to the work demands so maximum engagement is
seen in staffs. Some of the important resilience skills needed by staffs in end-of-life care
include leveraging personal strengths, self-regulating emotions, setting external
boundaries, developing realistic expectations and committing to professional
development in their work (Back et al., 2016). With such skills, staffs can become
proactive to common challenges in end-of-life care and take the right step to work for the
well-being of patients with deteriorating health.

3HEALTH AND WELL-BEING
Reference
Back, A. L., Steinhauser, K. E., Kamal, A. H., & Jackson, V. A. (2016). Building resilience for
palliative care clinicians: an approach to burnout prevention based on individual skills
and workplace factors. Journal of pain and symptom management, 52(2), 284-291.
Bainbridge, D., Brazil, K., Ploeg, J., Krueger, P., & Taniguchi, A. (2016). Measuring healthcare
integration: Operationalization of a framework for a systems evaluation of palliative care
structures, processes, and outcomes. Palliative medicine, 30(6), 567-579.
Detering, K. M., Hancock, A. D., Reade, M. C., & Silvester, W. (2010). The impact of advance
care planning on end of life care in elderly patients: randomised controlled
trial. Bmj, 340, c1345.
Kamal, A. H., Harrison, K. L., Bakitas, M., Dionne-Odom, J. N., Zubkoff, L., Akyar, I., ... &
Bull, J. (2015). Improving the quality of palliative care through national and regional
collaboration efforts. Cancer Control, 22(4), 396-402.