Collabria’s Compassionate Care By Jessica Zimmer | Photos Courtesy of Collabria Care For 42 years, Collabria Care has provided warm, thoughtful patient and familycentered services to patients with chronic and terminal illnesses. Hospice care is for patients with a terminal diagnosis who have been diagnosed as having six months or fewer to live. Providers home in on giving comfort-focused care for patients who no longer seek curative treatment. Palliative care, which Collabria Care has offered for the past six years, is for patients managing chronic illnesses such as heart disease, advanced dementia, and cancer. Providers help patients manage their symptoms with medical, emotional, and spiritual support, explains Lindsey Canavesio, a nurse practitioner for Collabria Care. Stephanie Mason, a medical social worker for Collabria Care, says that palliative and hospice care are on a spectrum. “[Palliative care] patients often progress and transition to hospice care,” she says. “On the other hand, many patients who begin hospice care improve and are then transitioned down to palliative care.” Collabria Care’s teams are composed of a wide variety of professionals, including a medical director, nurse practitioner, registered nurse, case manager, licensed vocational nurse, social worker, spiritual care provider, and home health aide. The team shares information and helps one another, ensuring that the patient receives care, the family is supported, and the patient’s wishes for their end-of-life care are met. A palliative care team also makes recommendations to the providing physicians for symptom management. Team members further assist patients and families in completing physician orders for life-sustaining treatment forms, advanced healthcare directives, and ongoing goals-of-care conversations. Hospice patients often worry about experiencing pain and anxiety as well as being a burden to their families. “Many people have things left unsaid and family and friends [to whom] they wish to say goodbye. It can be very difficult for a patient who has been independent to . . . give up control, needing total
care from their family,” says Mason. “As a social worker, I assess these concerns at each contact. I provide the patient with advocacy and a sense of agency, the sense that they have control over their remaining time.” Collabria’s staff help by offering compassionate, individualized care. “It takes a very special person to work in this field,” says Canavesio. “I feel like all our staff at Collabria put the patient and family needs first,” she says. They do what they can to make such a difficult time a more comfortable experience. Caregivers usually provide care at a patient’s home or at their assisted living or nursing facility. Sometimes this means traveling long distances to remote locations, often over winding country roads. Collabria Care reaches out to the Valley’s Latinx community by partnering with Ole Health, Napa’s nonprofit community health center. “We share a community health care worker between hospice and palliative care who is bilingual and bicultural. We also recruit volunteers from the Latinx community,” says Ashland Evans, director of hospice and palliative services at Collabria Care. “That way, patients and families have members from [their] community to teach and support them,” Dr. Paul Laband, internal medicine specialist with Collabria Care, says that working for Collabria Care has solidified his belief that the best way to care for someone is through a care-based model. A care-based model involves taking the emotional, physical, spiritual, and social needs and wishes of the patient and family into account. “Everyone who is involved in caring for the patient can have a voice,” he says. “The old way of ‘the doctor is always right’ doesn’t work anymore.” Collabria Care’s director of development operations, Erika Tavakoli, says that her advice for families is to sign a patient up for hospice care sooner rather than later. “Signing up for hospice isn’t a commitment,” she explains. “You can change your mind and stop receiving hospice at any time. It will not disqualify you from care later.” To learn more, visit collabriacare.org.