Grant: Project Grant

There is an urgent need to provide better support for older persons living with serious illness to stay at home and experience good quality of life, particularly in rural communities where there are few health care services. In this project we are going to implement and evaluate two innovations designed to provide this better support: Volunteer Navigation and Compassionate Communities. Nav-CARE is a volunteer navigation program that uses specially trained volunteers to work with persons in the home over months to years to connect them to community and resources. Nav-CARE has been shown to have a good impact on persons who receive services over multiple studies. However, hospice organizations who implement Nav-CARE often experience challenges recruiting volunteers and connecting volunteers to clients who need help because of the stigma associated with dying and palliative care. The Compassionate Communities movement was designed to address that stigma by raising awareness and educating the public about what it is like to live with dying and loss. Compassionate Communities have been forming all over Canada and the BC Centre for Palliative Care has designed a Toolkit to assist communities to do this work. In this project we will build on the strengths of these two innovations to create a model of Compassionate Communities Volunteer Navigation. We will implement a Compassionate Communities approach using the BC Centre for Palliative Care Compassionate Communities Toolkit in six diverse rural communities that have a hospice society with a strong Nav-CARE program. We will rigorously evaluate the Compassionate Communities approach and evaluate the Compassionate Communities effect on the Nav-CARE program. Knowledge from this study has the potential to create a new model of volunteerism that could increase the capacity to care, and improve quality of life, for older persons living with life-limiting illness in rural communities.