How you can succeed in resource advocacy for hospice patients (and the approach you must avoid/overcome)

Hospice patients and their family members deserve a social worker they can depend on. Your team and everyone you know deserve a world that includes some reliable people. A simple definition of a reliable person is someone follows through with promised tasks.

This is crucial when it comes to helping hospice patients acquire community resources.

It’s easy in hospice to let resource advocacy fall by the wayside. If you detect a need for a resource when visiting with a patient, and decide to intervene, remind yourself of this decision regularly until your mission is accomplished. Because documenting the intention to contact a resource might not be enough to ensure the topic is ever revisited. If there’s a huge caseload, you may not thoroughly review previous notes before each visit. If your agency’s census is huge, there may not be time in IDT to discuss all psychosocial needs. Even family members can forget they asked for help with something.

That’s why the passive “let me look into this” approach won’t work. Incomplete referrals can be forgotten. Read below about 2 approaches to ensure follow through.

Approach #1 to hospice resource advocacy: Contact the organization during the visit when you first detect the need.

When your patient’s daughter tells you the hurricane tore a hole in the roof and they can’t afford the repair bill, ask if you can go ahead and call a potential resource. Ask for consent to provide basic demographic and contact info. If they consent, go ahead and call a potentially helpful organization, if you have one in mind. If you don’t, call someone who might know where to start, such United Way.

This will get the ball rolling, even if you only leave a voicemail message asking them to call back the patient’s proxy. Document all of this, including the verbal consent you received from the patient’s family.

And now for the exciting part!

Making magic happen depends on your follow up. So schedule it. Put a time on the calendar for you to invest energy in checking in on the progress. Use whatever you use to avoid missing appointments, whether it’s an appointment book or Google calendar.

Your follow up could be a visit or just dedicated time in your office making calls. Somehow determine the progress the organization and family have made. Once you find out, schedule your next follow up. Don’t micromanage or distrust; stay apprised and encourage movement.

Approach #2 to hospice resource advocacy: Schedule your research and/or referral call

If for some reason it’s not ideal to call during your visit, schedule first contact for sometime within the next 24 hours. After you initiate the referral, schedule your follow up. Keep following up until the deeds are done.

Approach #Z to hospice resources: Let the proxy do it

Ever so often, you might want to let the patient’s proxy make the first call. I like to take concrete action like calling to facilitate communication, but it’s not required. Use your own discretion. And schedule your follow up.

Approach #1 is often best for hospice patients because…

There are good reasons to make the call from your patient’s home. You can read about them here, but one of the favorite reasons is that it’s a tangible service in a job where much of your work is quite intangible. You hold space and listen actively a lot, making the world a better place by doing so. But you’re colleagues may not affirm the value of that. Sometimes even your clients won’t.

Even the idea of “resource referrals,” which is what many in hospice believe to be the entirety of a social worker’s role, is vague and nebulous. What does it mean to “help with resources”? Does it mean you have a magical list? You Google something? Kinda sorta often yeah. What it really means is you do social work is that you: connect with clients, assess for needs, facilitate interventions, review results and repeat as needed. Facilitating interventions often involves not a special list or skill with Google, but a special perseverance that cuts through the ridiculous obstacles.

So I like Approach #1. But regardless of how contact is initiated, use your calendar to keep yourself involved until the need is resolved.

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What I’m learning about hospice as I face my grandfather’s illness, Part 1

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[Update: I'm back!] A month off for military training - wish me luck and see you soon!