HOSPICE CARE PLUS INC

1.Broaden our grief and loss services to the community through specialized grief groups and workshops, including partnering with schools in our service area to provide on-site grief groups for children.  2. Support our staff and volunteers by increasing professional development & ongoing education opportunities, including increasing the number of staff certified in hospice and palliative care. 3. Expand support for family caregivers in our service area by offering family caregivers workshops tailored to the needs of caregivers whose loved ones are not yet appropriate for hospice care. 4. Increase our patients & families' access to Crisis Intervention Care at home, by adding additional staffing to meet needs. 5. Review our nurse-aid scheduling to ensure that it best meets the needs of the patients and families we serve. 6. Increase the number of visits our direct-care staff make to patients & families when death is near, to ensure adequate support, teaching, and comfort. 7. Implement new cost-savings measures to support our financial health and ensure we can fund our mission. 8. Offer additional teaching and training to our staff to ensure full compliance with all HIPAA standards.

1. Broaden Grief & Loss Services: Strategies are to increase volunteer support to the professional bereavement team through a specialized training. An additional 12 bereavement volunteers allows us to increase the type and frequency of support, from bereavement phone calls and literature mailings to support groups and workshops. We will also restructure slightly to allot a portion of our Volunteer Coordinator’s time to supporting the bereavement program. 2. Ongoing Education: One strategy is to research the time and expense of certification by discipline, use that information to create a fair system for incentivizing certification, and include in our 2020-2021 budgets a reasonable amount to fund this initiative. A second strategy is to increase the number of hours available to plan and implement quick inservices for clinical staff throughout the year, and to offer those based on our annual educational needs assessment survey. 3. Support for Family Caregivers: Our primary strategy is to use a limited number of direct-care staff hours to support family caregiver workshops, and to realign the priority areas for our outreach staff to promote focus on this goal. 4. Increase Access to Crisis Intervention Care (CIC): Primary strategies are to increase staffing to meet this need, to report on the number of CIC hour provided each month to ensure we’re offering this service, and to initiate Monday-morning huddles during which patient care staff will review who among their patients and families may need CIC. 5. Nurse-Aid Scheduling: Strategies are to ask the nurse-aid discipline and nursing discipline to discuss alternative scheduling models and to shift from self-scheduling to nursing-led scheduling in collaboration with the nurse-aid team. 6. Increase Visits at the End of Life: Our strategy is to utilize an audit schedule to determine how many visits are made during the hours and days preceding death, then to set a reasonable goal and audit schedule to ensure we’re meeting the goal. 7. Cost-Savings Measures: We will target medical supplies to see if it’s possible to obtain these at a lower cost by reviewing the top-20 supply items and evaluating other options, while continuing to provide quality supplies that meet patient needs. 8. Increase HIPAA Training to Protect Patient Information: Our strategy is to modify our 2019-2020 ongoing education plan, our new employee training, and our required annual education modules to ensure that all include training information related to protecting the privacy of patient information.

1. An excellent volunteer pool of over 123 individuals and a highly experienced staff. 2. Partnerships with UK, the Kentucky Hospice Network, and the National Association of Hospice and Palliative Care that gives us access to experts in the hospice, palliative, and bereavement fields to enrich our education and training initiatives. 3. High family satisfaction scores (above the national average) that serves to make families for former hospice patients strong ambassadors for hospice and palliative care in our communities. 4. Long-term leadership in our directors and at the board level that brings stability, experience, and expertise to our efforts. 5. Strong community support and financial stewardship that allows us access to the funds necessary to maintain and improve patient, family, and community care efforts. 6. A good relationship with foundations to help us plan new programs and strengthen existing ones.

Our ultimate intended impact is to meet the needs of the seriously ill and the bereaved in our service area through hospice, palliative, and bereavement programs, and to do so with high quality, compassionate, expert care that is provided to all, regardless of insurance status or ability to pay. The strategic planning goals we’ve listed are steps toward those mission-based goals. Bereavement Goal: Already, we’ve trained two groups of volunteers to help us add many more supportive mail and phone contacts, added a monthly support group that is open both to families of former hospice patients and to the community, conducted one school-based grief group for children in conjunction with a Family Resource Center, scheduled one-on-one support sessions for children utilizing pet therapy, and scheduled our first Shadow Box Workshop, a tactile way to address grief and loss for those who aren’t comfortable with support groups. Professional Development Goal:  In 2019, we’ve more than doubled inservices and we’ve partnered with the Kentucky Hospice Network to provide all-day, intensive workshops focused on critical topics. Our next step is to continue our research into certification programs for clinical staff. We’ve created a library of the available hospice & palliative certifications for each discipline, their requirements, timelines, and costs. Our leadership team will review, create a suggested incentive plan, incorporate related costs into our budget plan for 2020, and then solicit input. One concern is that the financial impact will be higher than is manageable or sustainable, in which case we will discuss other creative ways to support certification. Family Caregiver Goal: This is related to research that, when families initiate hospice involvement, they engage hospice and palliative care earlier, have better outcomes, and are more satisfied with their care. A key way to increase the number of families who contact their local hospices is to build relationships with family caregivers BEFORE they need us. In 2018, we initiated Family Caregiver Workshops with max capacity at each offering. In 2019, we began offering monthly inservices to Senior Citizens Centers in our service area. Crisis Intervention Care (CIC) Goal: This goal is related to providing high quality, compassionate, expert care for those we serve. CIC involves placing a combination of nurses and nurse aids in patient homes for several consecutive hours in a 24-hour period. It is initiated when the patient has an intractable symptom that, without intensive management at home, would require inpatient care. Since most families choose hospice because they want to remain at home for their last months, it’s essential to make CIC available. In the past, we’ve struggled to maintain appropriate staffing due to fluctuations in demand. So far this year, we’ve more than doubled the CIC services we’ve been able to offer our patients and families.