Improving care for the patients who are in the last phase of their lives has been a field that most health care providers have struggled with during last few years. Having worked with hundreds of providers throughout the country, these experienced authors know what providers need when it comes to implementing a quality improvement project. This guide will provide user-friendly, step-by-step instructions on how to implement a quality improvement project in the full range of care settings. The instructions will be brought to life with specific examples from actual successful projects and key information on the best practices in the industry. Readers will also be pointed to resources available online and elsewhere, with information on how to access them. The guide will be written in an informal, maximally helpful style, with checklists, tables, and boxed information. Answering 80% of the questions in less than half the space, The Common Sense Guide is the perfect portable companion to Dr. Lynn's desk reference, Improving Care for the End of Life. The book will be of great interest to all health care professionals involved in the care of those with serious chronic illness -- doctors, nurses, social workers, chaplains, clinic administrators, quality improvement experts, and so forth.

1. An Orientation 2. Basics of Quality Improvement 3. Advance Care Planning 4. Preventing, Assessing, and Treating Pain 5. Assuring Comfort 6. Caring for Caregivers 7. Continuity and Transfers 8. Chronic Care: Heart and Lung Failure 9. Nursing Home Quality: Pressure Ulcers 10. Improving Care for People with Advanced Dementia and Their Families 11. Improving Intensive Care Units 12. Building a Palliative Care Program 13. Hospice Program Quality 14. End-of-Life Care, Spiritual Support, and Bereavement 15. Beyond Quality Improvement: Policy Improvement

Joanne Lynn, M.D.Director, RAND Center to Improve Care of the Dying, Ekta Chaudhry, Lin Noyes Simon, Anne M. WilkinsonSenior Social and Behavioral Scientist, RAND Corporation, Janice Lynch Schuster

"Everyone who works in palliative care needs to read this gem of a guide to achieving measurable quality improvements in palliative care, and that includes administrators...This is a practical, how-to-do-it book that is packed with useful information and written with an energy that is infectious."--Roger Woodruff, Director of Palliative Care, Austin Health, Melbourne, Australia |k No