Hospice care does not occur in a vacuum, and many operators find themselves building partnerships with other community organizations to better serve patients and support their staff.

Providers work with other institutions to provide general inpatient and respite care, address social determinants of health and improve health equity, among other initiatives. Some also partner with medical and nursing schools to ensure students in health care fields gain exposure to hospice and palliative care principles.

“It really takes the entire community to serve this population and for us to be successful as an organization and, most importantly, for our patients to be successful in their journey of care. We are really required to partner with many entities,” Skelly Wingard, CEO of By the Bay Health, said at the Hospice News Elevate Conference. “A success factor is not only building the initial transactional partnership, but getting really deep about what these patients need and require in every community.”

By the Bay Health currently partners with various hospitals to provide space for general inpatient units, including those affiliated with the University of California at San Francisco and Stanford.

The nonprofit provider also has agreements with local institutions of higher learning to help students prepare for careers in the hospice and palliative care fields, as it works to address the industry-wide staffing shortage. Going beyond the college level, the organization gives presentations at high schools and other educational settings to help students and faculty learn about the services they provide.

The pandemic also spurred more collaboration between hospices and other community resources, according to Mary Shankster, chief development office at Stillwater Hospice. This ranged from breweries and distilleries that began manufacturing hand sanitizer to other entities that could provide much needed supplies.

“I really got to know one of the individuals in our local Department of Homeland Security office. I’d never thought I would have a connection or a partnership with someone in that capacity,” Shankster told Hospice News at Elevate. “They had an excess of surgical masks, about 800,000 in storage. We were able to help really roll those out within the 12 counties within our service area to various nonprofits, health care providers and skilled nursing communities that we already had relationships with. This happened because we had really reached out and built these true relationships with different organizations.”

Stillwater has also launched an employee education fund that allows staff to further advance their training, allowing CNAs to become registered nurses, for example.

Going forward, the company is investigating ways to help employees with child care and other necessities that could affect their ability to come to work, Shankster indicated.

“We’re trying to really build those partnerships with our funders, our individual donors and corporations to allow us to have the funding to be able to give back to our employees,” Shankster said.

In another innovative set of partnerships, Virginia-based Blue Ridge Hospice has been collaborating with local EMS and fire-rescue departments to help them prepare to serve seriously and terminally ill patients.

This is particularly important for the rural areas that Blue Ridge serves, in which patients often live a significant distance away from health care facilities and service providers. This initiative has helped patients avoid disruptions in service, unnecessary emergency department visits or revocation of the hospice benefit, according to Blue Ridge COO Altonia Garrett.

“We are working with the local EMTs to educate them about what hospice is and what our hospice patients look like. They’re going to be trained on how to ask about hospice services because some families forget to mention their own service with us,” Garrett told Hospice News at Elevate. “They’ll be able to get in there, call and collaborate with us to offer intervention through our providers’ recommendations until our team gets there to support them.”