Welcome to VHA Innovation Ecosystem podcast! On this episode, we cover advanced care planning and programs that help Veterans have difficult conversations with their care providers and families.
Dr. Kimberly Garner and Laura Taylor speak to Advanced Care Planning via Group Visits (ACP-GV). ACP-GV uses interactive, patient-centered group sessions led by health care professionals to engage Veterans in thinking about and planning for future medical decisions. Participation in the group discussions often leads to better management of chronic disease and increased access to primary care, along with enhanced communication, decision-making, and satisfaction.
The second practice featured in today’s episode is the Life Sustaining Treatment Veteran Education Video. This practice aims to create a video explaining life-sustaining treatments for Veterans who are visual learners to optimize their decision-making. The video is under development by Elizabeth Williams, an Innovation Specialist and a Clinical Nurse Leader at the Gulf Coast Veterans Health Care System.
In the final segment, Dr. Marvin Swartz, the co-director of the National Resource Center on Psychiatric Advance Directives (NRC-PAD) discusses psychiatric advance directives, or PADs. PADs are legal documents that record a person’s preferences for future mental health treatment. NRC-PAD serves as a place for consumers to access the timeliest PAD documentation for their jurisdiction. NRC-PAD also advocates for the implementation of laws that support patient-centered mental health care.
Episode Resources:
VHA Innovators Network
Diffusion of Excellence Initiative
U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs
Gulf Coast Veterans Health Care System
Little Rock Geriatric Research, Education, and Clinical Center
National Resource Center on Psychiatric Advance Directives
Key Episode Quotes:
"A Veteran told me, ‘Thank you for caring enough about us to share this with us or to tell us about this.’ I hear fairly frequently from Veterans that they appreciate being told proactively about things and not having to hunt that information down themselves.” – Dr. Kimberly Garner, Associate Director of VISN 16, Little Rock Geriatric Research, Education and Clinical Center
“We just celebrated serving 10,000 Veterans through the program, and our long-term plan is really for Advanced Care Planning via Group Visits to be offered in every VA facility, nationwide.” – Laura Taylor, National Director of Social Work Care Management and Social Work
"He said if he knew that this was what the provider were talking about, he would have said no on the front end…There was a learning gap between conversations about these important things and what Veterans understood or took from that.” – Elizabeth Williams, Innovation Specialist and Clinical Nurse Leader in Acute Care at Gulf Coast Veterans Healthcare System
"When a person can't consent to treatment, then treatment has to be administered involuntarily, and that can have consequences that's distressing to a person with severe mental illness…these mechanisms are out there, these legal tools are out there, but not that many people know about them. We'd like more widespread knowledge and tools to use them to be available." – Dr. Marvin Swartz, Co-Director of the National Resource Center on Psychiatric Advance Directives
