Hello Northern Californians!
In case you haven’t already heard, we want you to know about an upcoming fabulous opportunity. We have scheduled our first northern California volunteer training in San Francisco for Sunday, August 18 from 10 am – 4 pm (includes lunch). We still have four seats left to fill and would love anyone interested to join us!
Information About our Volunteer Teams
Client Advocate Volunteers provide the following services:
- Thoroughly explain all the different options for dying well and how to achieve them; including stopping life-preserving medical treatments, seeking palliative care, entering hospice, voluntary stopping eating and drinking with the support of hospice, palliative sedation, and medical aid in dying.
- Help people navigate through their dying process, from beginning to end. Sometimes this takes days, sometimes weeks or months: sometimes 1-2 meetings, sometimes many more.
- Advocacy and support for clients whose wishes are not being met or who are not getting adequate pain or symptom management.
- Meet with families to help facilitate discussions about the client’s end-of-life wishes.
- Provide information and support to family members regarding the process of their loved one’s dying, what to expect and how they can best provide compassionate and helpful support.
- Provide support and reassurance to the client as he/she navigates their way through the process of accessing medical aid in dying and encouraging the client/family to advocate for themselves. We are willing also to advocate for them if necessary, such as helping the client find physicians willing to prescribe and facilitate a conversation with physicians or hospice to help clients get needed services or adequate pain control.
- We are able to bring an experienced, calm, peaceful and reassuring presence on the day of planned death, to help review instructions and provide moral support and comfort to both the client and family.
- Assist in completing or understanding advance directives.
Our EOLCCA volunteers also can be trained to provide educational presentations to hospices, community groups and others to help the public understand about ALL their end of life options.
Please complete a Client Advocate Volunteer application by August 10. Once it is received, we will contact you with additional information including the location and address of the training session. Please contact us if you have any questions or would like more information. We’d love to talk with you.
