More from the Grantmakers In Health Annual Conference: Diane Meier on Palliative Care; a Film on Elder Care

This past week, I gave you a brief glimpse of the 2015 GIH Annual Conference in Austin, Texas. Here are two more vignettes from the conference, held in March. Its theme was Pathways to Health. Diane Meier Director of the Center to Advance Palliative Care at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and a past MacArthur Fellow (2008), Diane Meier was another plenary speaker. She commented to the audience of mostly foundation staffers that her body of work and career in palliative care is due to the support of private-sector philanthropy, including more than twenty foundations. Following are just some of the points she made in a stimulating and persuasive speech. Meier noted that health spending in the United States is very highly concentrated among the highest-risk, sickest patients. (Of course, the sickest people are the costliest to the health care system.) The question is, though, are we spending money in a way that improves the quality of care? She pointed out that palliative care is not limited to the dying. It addresses pain and other symptoms and supports overworked family caregivers. Palliative care is for people at any age—for example, it could be used for someone age twenty-four with curable leukemia, she noted. Meier mentioned an illustrative example of overuse of the emergency department (ED) by a man, age eighty-eight, who was in pain from severe spinal arthritis. He was in too much pain to get up from a chair. His elderly wife could not move him, and ...
Source: Health Affairs Blog - Category: Health Management Authors: Tags: Costs and Spending GrantWatch Health Professionals Hospitals Long-term Services and Supports Quality Aging Health Care Delivery Health Philanthropy Home Health Palliative Care Physicians Workforce Source Type: blogs