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Tuesday, May 13
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 Sharon Latson |
Embracing Diversity in End-of-Life Care
Originally published in Chicago Hospital News, Feb. 2006
by William Johnson, MD
When it comes to end-of-life care, African Americans, Hispanics and people of color want what everyone wants: to be free of pain; to be at home, surrounded by the people they love; to enjoy quality of life even when quantity of life is limited.
Yet statistics show that fewer than nine percent of hospice patients in the United States are African Americans and fewer than seven percent are of Hispanic descent. VITAS Innovative Hospice Care®, the largest and one of the oldest hospice providers in the nation, is working to change that.
As VITAS’ senior director of access initiatives for the past eight months, Sharon Latson keeps the company focused on its goals. “An access initiative should be part of every VITAS general manager’s strategic plan,” she insists. One sign of success in Latson’s native Chicagoland is that the diversity in the community is reflected throughout all levels of the VITAS staff.
As an African American, Latson is committed to making a meaningful difference in the African-American community. But she has been taking the measure of diversity since she was 12 years old and integrated into a diverse high school: Jewish, Polish, Latino, African American.
“It broadened my perspective,” she says, and she has been broadening others’ perspectives ever since. She urges people to use terms like “communities of color” and “diverse populations” instead of “ethnic groups” and “minorities.” She’ll redirect well-intentioned committees, explaining that they can’t just tell people what they need to know. “You need to have conversations to build trust,” she’ll advise. “You need to recognize what’s gone before. You need to ask what they want.”
A child of the ‘60s, Latson admits that she’s always been a “soapbox politician,” expounding on injustice wherever she saw it. In 1976 her father died of prostate cancer at the age of 56. To her everlasting sorrow, it was in a hospital and in pain. “He suffered greatly,” she says. “He would have preferred to be in his home. But hospice was not available back then. There was no way for him to express how he wanted things done.”
Right Place, Right Time
Latson was working for Stewart Communications in Chicago in 2000 when she was assigned to publicize the PBS series “On Our Own Terms: Moyers on Dying.” She saw a preview of the show and, true to form, refused to allow glowing reviews to overshadow its shortcomings.
“It didn’t tell the story of Latinos and African Americans as well as it could have,” she says. “The big picture was very white, very upper class. The diversity aspect was missing.” Among the inconsistencies that motivated Latson were the absence of any family focus in the Hispanic patient’s story, and the financial burden the African-American family took on. “For reasons that are unclear,” says Latson, “they never accessed hospice services to assist them in the care of their dying mother.”
Latson has worked to alleviate such burdens ever since, educating healthcare professionals as well as families on end-of-life care. Through initiatives like APPEAL (A Progressive Palliative Care Educational Curriculum for the Care of African Americans at Life’s End) and the Last Mile of the Way Home, a national conference to improve end-of-life care for African Americans, Latson has worked with “astounding women” like Dr. Bernice Harper and Dr. Marian Gray Secundy to bring African-American, Asian and Latino-American leaders into the conversation. “It reawakened my passion for doing end-of-life work,” she says.
Passion Grows
Today Latson brings her passion to VITAS. She also serves on the boards of directors of the Foundation for Hospice in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Women Living with Pain Coalition and the Intercultural Cancer Council. Her audience is sometimes national, sometimes local, sometimes one-on-one.
“When someone tells me, ‘I got that document you were talking about,’ or ‘Thank you for telling me about that service,’ I know I’m reaching them,” she says. “As a Baby Boomer, I see my friends caring for their parents. It’s been seven years since I began talking about options at the end of life, and they’re finally coming to me and asking about advance directives. I can have that conversation about hospice and they see me as a resource. At the end of the day, I know I’m making a difference.
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