Multi-level training in store for palliative care volunteers

The district’s palliative care committee, now seeking applicants interested in working with individuals and families facing life-threatening illnesses, hopes to get a 30-hour training program underway for selected volunteers by the end of March.
The training, to be led by community professionals, will give volunteers a solid background in situations they’ll encounter when helping families through very tough times, said Wilma Sletmoen, regional co-ordinator for the palliative care program (a long-term care initiative through the Ministry of Health).
But Sletmoen also stressed those applicants who are selected already will have at least one important quality under their belt–the ability to be a good listener.
“There will be a big emphasis on communication skills [and on] the psychological, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of death and dying,” she explained.
The palliative care training program will be based on a similar one offered by the Hospice Association of Ontario, which represents some 80 hospices throughout Ontario that help people with life-threatening and terminal illnesses to live at home or in home-like settings.
Other aspects of the training includes a greater knowledge of the common symptoms and stages of specific diseases (such as cancer, Alzheimer’s, and AIDS), and an emphasis on various cultural aspects of death and dying.
International Falls resident Sheila Johnson, owner of “The Coffee Landing Metro,” knows firsthand the depth of support and caring palliative care volunteers bring to families facing the imminent death of a loved one.
Two years ago, her mother Jane, who lived in California, was diagnosed with brain cancer. Johnson and other members of her family flew there to be with the dying woman and found the key to their emotional survival in the hands of volunteers.
“Mom died less than six weeks after she was diagnosed [and] I cannot imagine how lonely, frustrated, and desperate we all would have been if we hadn’t have had hospice care,” she said yesterday.
Hospice care also meant Johnson’s mother could live at home during her advanced illness, where her loved ones could be nearby.
“They were always available, very supportive, and generous,” said Johnson. “[Hospice volunteers] are definitely about the business of dying and they led us down a path we had never been on before.”
But although Johnson felt strongly about the invaluable contribution hospice or palliative care volunteers give to dying patients and their families, she believed the public’s perspective on the subject was still a touchy one.
“There’s still a real block [out there] and people do not do well with talking about death,” she said. “But we’re all going to [die] and we’re going to know somone who’s going to [die].”
Johnson then made an analogy between palliative care and travelling to a foreign country for the first time.
“If I was going to tour France and had never been there before, I’d want to someone who knew France to show me,” she reasoned.
More than 20 people have expressed an interest in becoming a palliative care volunteer in the district so far, and Sletmoen said she was pleased with the response.
“We’ve had calls from a lot of people who have experienced a death of someone close and they understand the things people go through,” she noted. “They genuinely are interested in helping others through that.
“That’s what I really admire because this is a difficult area for volunteers–it’s not like mowing someone’s lawn,” she reasoned.
The training program also will help volunteers decide if palliative care work is right for them.
Sletmoen said the committee was still fine-tuning guidelines and policies for the palliative care program but hoped to have it up and running before summer.