Partners in Slow Medicine: An interdisciplinary organization
- Addresses the promise and implications of Slow Medicine.
- Brings together health professionals and organizations, policy makers, insurance providers, and individuals.
- Explores and expands the Slow Medicine principles and practices with the dual goals of keeping older people as healthy and independent as possible and providing better quality and more personalized care.
Principles and practices:
From Dr. Dennis McCullough's book, My Mother, Your Mother: Embracing "Slow Medicine," The Compassionate Approach to Caring For Your Aging Loved Ones, 2008. These principles include:
- Understanding fully the aging person and their complex, ever-evolving needs.
- Emphasizing the dignity of the person and the right to make informed decisions.
- Encouraging clear and open communication and greater coordination of care between families, an elder's Circle of Concern, and myriad health professionals.
- Encouraging more reflective, thoughtful, slowed decision-making in all non-emergency situations as a means for expanding choices for elders.
- Limiting the human and financial costs and maximizing the rewards of different levels of medical intervention.
- Questioning systematically the overuse of hospitalizations, extensive testing and specialists' care.
- Encouraging individual, informed wishes, including declining medical interventions.
- Offering compassionate covenantal care to declining elders.
Research evidence and support:
- Residents and their families report very high satisfaction with their autonomy, compassionate care and quality of life in the Kendal-at-Hanover care system where Slow Medicine originated. Preliminary Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care comparisons suggest this approach outperforms a selected comparison group of Senior Living Communities in the areas of acute and emergency medical services utilization and overall costs.
Membership and contacts:
All individuals, medical professionals and organizations, family members, policy makers and others interested in these ideas are welcome. For further information, please contact us at: