End of Life Care Notes: Around the United States

• A new website was launched in May 2009 to assist Texans in making end-of-life care plans.
  

  An Internet site is making it easier for Texans to do their "end-of-life planning."
  
  Craig Klugman, director of the Center for Medical Humanities and Ethics at The University of Texas, has created a site where Texas residents can find the forms needed to make a living will - also known as an advance directive.
  
  The interactive site walks people through the process and decodes the "legalese" used on the forms, according to the University of Texas Health Science Center.



• Hawaii is taking steps to establish POLST documents in the state. The governor has until July 15 to sign a new bill.
  

  The recently passed legislation, House Bill 1379, establishes procedures for obtaining and using "physician orders for life-sustaining treatment," or POLST, documents that clearly state the patient's treatment directives in emergencies and other treatment situations.



• Volunteers of America in Minnesota is launching a program to have volunteers serve as elder advocates for those without family or close friends to assist them.
  

  They are called "elder orphans" -- perhaps 8,000 or so older Minnesotans in fragile health who have outlived their families, close friends and even their ability to make important medical or financial decisions.
  
  . . .
  
  In a program believed the first of its kind, Bornong's social service agency, Volunteers of America (VOA), is seeking out people like Furman, helping them fill out health-care instructions, then working to find advocates for them.



• This New York Times article talks about a night care program for Alzheimer's patients at the Hebrew Home at Riverdale in the northern Bronx, New York. There is an accompanying slide show and video.
  

  While there are countless day care programs for the nation’s estimated 5.3 million Alzheimer’s patients, some experts believe that ElderServe at Night, which began a decade ago, is the only one of its kind in the country.
  
  Participants are fetched from their homes by vans and spend 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. painting, potting plants, dancing and talking — or, for those immobilized by their disease, relaxing amid music, massage and twinkling lights. The patients rest as they need, for a few minutes or a few hours, and return home the next morning fed, showered and, usually, tuckered out.