New partner, Schwartz Center, calls for nominations: National Compassionate Caregiver of the Year

Remember a time when you were in the hospital or doctor’s office, feeling nervous and anxious about a shot, treatment or diagnosis? And remember there was someone who made you feel safe, answered all your questions, or did something small that had a big impact?

It’s like what Ken Schwartz said during his battle with lung cancer, “These acts of kindness – the simple human touch from my caregivers – have made the unbearable bearable.” Those experiences inspired Ken to create an outline for an organization to promote compassionate care so that patients and their caregivers can relate to one other in a way that provides hope to the patient, support to caregivers and sustenance to the healing process. And just days before his death in 1995, he founded the Schwartz Center for Compassionate Healthcare.

For 16 of the last 20 years the Schwartz Center has been honoring extraordinary professional caregivers and teams who embody characteristics of compassionate care, like listening carefully, showing empathy, instilling hope and more. We’re proud to be partnered with them in their continued efforts. And you can be a part of it, too.

The Schwartz Center is calling for nominations for its National Compassionate Caregiver of the Year (NCCY) award, and you have until May 1 to submit your nomination.

Award-winning author Atul Gawande will present the award at the Kenneth B. Schwartz Compassionate Healthcare Dinner in November, which coincides with the Schwartz Center’s 20thanniversary. His work focuses on the difficult choices caregivers, patients and families face every day and the issues that can make it hard to provide high-quality, cost-effective and compassionate healthcare.

Do something special
If you have special healthcare providers in your life, honor them for their excellence by nominating them for National Compassionate Caregiver of the Year. It’s a simple but powerful way to show your appreciation for a job well (and compassionately) done.

“Receiving the Schwartz Center award … affirmed that rewarding feeling at the end of an encounter with a patient, when you see hope and relief in their eyes – it’s priceless,”  said Thea James, MD, last year’s Schwartz Center Compassionate Caregiver Award recipient.

More about the partnership
Over the last 20 years, the Schwartz Center focused on providing compassionate care, while over the last 10 years, we’ve brought the patient voice and the patient story to the life sciences community. We’re excited about the new alliance, which will help us better understand the patient’s perception of compassionate care. We can strengthen the relationship between patients and their healthcare providers, which leads to better health outcomes, lower costs and greater patient satisfaction.

Working together, we’ll survey our members to gather their feedback on a proposed Schwartz Center Compassionate Care Scale™, designed to let healthcare organizations measure and reward the compassionate care that doctors, nurses and other caregivers provide to patients and families. Jointly, we’ll create content to teach patients what compassionate care really is and how to ask for it.

Julie Rosen, executive director of the Schwartz Center, commented on the part PatientsLikeMe will play in evaluating compassionate care:

“As in other areas of healthcare, we believe measurement can play an important role in improving patients’ care experiences, and we are thrilled to have a collaborator that can help us ensure that we’re measuring what is most important to patients in language they can understand.”

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