Pro-Change is assisting Vital Decisions in its mission to help empower seriously ill patients and their families to exert control in the decisions associated with their care at the end of life and to align these care decisions with their personal preferences and values.
Pro-Change will design Transtheoretical Model of Behavior Change assessments for identifying a patient’s stage of readiness to actively participate in the planning of their care. Interventions and goals will be developed for those not yet ready, those getting ready and those ready to make a plan.
Vital Decisions will use the assessments, interventions, and goals to facilitate their care planning program, “The Living Well Program”. This program, consisting of a series of telephone based counseling sessions, is guided by the patients’ personal preferences and priorities in the areas of independence, interactivity and comfort, and the actions that are required to be taken by the patient to realize their preferences.
The goal of this collaborative effort is to help seriously ill patients take control by articulating their preferences and choices, and to assist them in documenting and communicating those choices to loved ones and medical care providers. “Using the Transtheoretical Model will help us to improve the quality of our service and the value that we are able to provide to patients,” stated Mitchell Daitz, President of Vital Decisions.