Whole Health, Age Friendly, and Life Sustaining Treatments
PPC is considered a Whole Health Practice and a model of care supporting Age Friendly Systems of Care. PPC implementation can be counted towards Whole Health and Age Friendly activities and practices, helping a clinic and facility capture Whole Health and Age Friendly effort. Here is a Webinar given by Dr. Ritchey about using PPC to identify What Matters to the Veteran.
A quick informational sheet about the intersection between Whole Health, Age Friendly Systems of Care and PPC can be found here.
Here is a helpful presentation that was presented by Dr. Katherine Ritchey, Lea Kieffer, and Kim Church to the National Whole Health Field Implementation Team (FIT) experts.
Engagement with local or facility level Whole Health Partners is a good strategy with implementation of PPC and Age Friendly Systems of Care. Both the PPC approach and tools such as the Patient Health Inventory (PHI) can help elicit ‘what matters’ to a veteran. PPC however is an approach that was specifically designed with complex, older veterans in mind and its training is unique and different from Whole Health coaching.
Clinicians who have undergone Whole Health trainings are well suited to PPC facilitation. Prior Whole health training is not mandatory but extremely helpful and may quicken the proficiency to become a PPC facilitator. We encourage you to reach out to your local / facility Whole Health Partners (director, coaches, staff) to collaborate on ways PPC and Age Friendly Systems of Care can extend Whole Health clinical care and well-being programs to older, complex Veterans.
Whole Health Factors should be utilized in PPC or Age Friendly work. For more details on Health Factors click here.
PPC conversations and/or notes (templates) do not replace a LST note. Patient Priorities Care is about co-current care planning, thus a separate entity in the larger picture of advanced care planning. PPC facilitate conversations about what is happening now in the context of a person with multiple complex, chronic health conditions who may have a shorter life expectancy but are not technically at the end of their life. The identification of patient values and priorities through the PPC approach is a helpful companion to more specific conversations about end-of-life decisions and resuscitation preferences. However, you should continue to document patient preferences related to serious/terminal illness and life sustaining treatments (i.e., DNAR orders) using the LST note template.