Engage With Grace

As patients, as family members, as friends, as health care providers, we have all faced end-of-life issues at one time or another, and we will face them again.  And again. 

This weekend, the "Engage With Grace" message is being broadcast virally, through a "blog rally," at a time when many people are with family and friends over the long weekend.  The point is: we all need to have the potentially uncomfortable conversation with people close to us about what kind of treatment we would want, and they would want, if incapable of making or communicating health care decisions.  (Check out coverage of last year's blog rally in the Boston Globe.) 

End-of-life decision-making has long been an issue of great personal and professional interest to me, and I am proud to have played a role in having out-of-hospital DNR orders recognized in Massachusetts by EMS providers, as an example. 

Download your copies of the Massachusetts health care proxy form or other states' proxy or living will forms — and add specific instructions about nutrition, hydration, and anything else that is important to you so that everything is crystal clear.  My mom kept a stack of living will forms in the dining room when I was growing up, and was not shy about raising the issue with dinner guests and offering to witness their directives.  Having the conversation is a starting point; we all need to follow through and make sure that our loved ones' wishes are documented, placed in medical records, discussed with physicians and other caregivers, and honored. 

When I have the opportunity to speak to groups of lawyers or health care providers, I often ask for a show of hands: how many of you have health care proxies?  The percentage seems to have increased over time, but it is still not where it needs to be.  If groups that should be above average in this respect are not all raising their hands, then we clearly have a lot to do in terms of educating the general public about the need to have the sometimes difficult conversation with friends and family members.  That's what the Engage With Grace project is all about.  And with that, I turn over this post to Engage With Grace:

Last Thanksgiving weekend, many of us bloggers participated in the first documented “blog rally” to promote Engage With Grace – a movement aimed at having all of us understand and communicate our end-of-life wishes. It was a great success, with over 100 bloggers in the healthcare space and beyond participating and spreading the word. Plus, it was timed to coincide with a weekend when most of us are with the very people with whom we should be having these tough conversations – our closest friends and family. Our original mission – to get more and more people talking about their end of life wishes – hasn’t changed. But it’s been quite a year – so we thought this holiday, we’d try something different. A bit of levity. At the heart of Engage With Grace are five questions designed to get the conversation started. We’ve included them at the end of this post. They’re not easy questions, but they are important. To help ease us into these tough questions, and in the spirit of the season, we thought we’d start with five parallel questions that ARE pretty easy to answer:

Silly? Maybe. But it underscores how having a template like this – just five questions in plain, simple language – can deflate some of the complexity, formality and even misnomers that have sometimes surrounded the end-of-life discussion. So with that, we’ve included the five questions from Engage With Grace below. Think about them, document them, share them.

Over the past year there’s been a lot of discussion around end of life. And we’ve been fortunate to hear a lot of the more uplifting stories, as folks have used these five questions to initiate the conversation.

One man shared how surprised he was to learn that his wife’s preferences were not what he expected. Befitting this holiday, The One Slide now stands sentry on their fridge.

Wishing you and yours a holiday that’s fulfilling in all the right ways.


To learn more please go to www.engagewithgrace.org. This post was written by Alexandra Drane and the Engage With Grace team. If you want to reproduce this post on your blog (or anywhere) you can download a ready-made html version here.

Update 11/29/09:  Paul Levy, one of the moving forces behind this blog rally, has been cataloging the participants over at his blog, Running a Hospital.

David HarlowThe Harlow Group LLC
Health Care Law and Consulting