Partnering for Palliative Care: Improving Quality of Life in Rural Communities

Our team is working to improve the quality of life of patients with life-limiting chronic disease in a frontier area of North Central Washington State. 

Our project’s primary aim is to build palliative care services that are accessible to all residents of Okanogan County, with a special focus on the LatinX and Native American communities. Okanogan County is a huge, sparsely populated and poor area with limited access to specialty care of any kind and no integrated palliative care services. To achieve our aims, we started the Okanogan Palliative Care Initiative and have partnered with the local hospice, community clinics and hospitals, among others.

Our aims are fourfold:

1. Build a specialized palliative care clinical service to support seriously ill patients and their primary care providers,
2. Increase advance care planning by offering community education and workshops,
3. Develop palliative care services that are responsive to the unique challenges and cultural attributes of the LatinX and Native American communities, and
4. Educate community providers including Emergency Medical Services (EMS) on primary palliative care.