Working with Sutter Health to support family caregivers
This year we began a two-year project in partnership with the Palliative Care Team at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation (PAMF), which is part of the Sutter Health Network. The aim of the project is to introduce support sessions for family caregivers within Sutter Health.
The project began with Zen Caregiving Project (ZCP) delivering four sessions to the Palliative Care Team in Palo Alto and San Mateo. These sessions covered self-care, managing difficult emotions, loss, and maintaining healthy boundaries. The sessions were a way of introducing ZCP’s teaching approach and content to staff, helping them to recommend the sessions to family caregivers in the future, and hopefully also provided support to the staff in their emotionally demanding work.
The next stage of the project will be running our CAREgivers program for family caregivers in Sutter Health. The CAREgivers course consists of six one-hour sessions, run weekly. The sessions are drop-in providing flexibility for the caregivers with their often unpredictable schedules. Each session includes some teaching on a topic, a short guided meditation, activities, and an opportunity for sharing with other caregivers in the group.
We are working with social workers from two Sutter Health locations to recruit for our first pilot course in October and are planning to run another three to four courses in 2022. We hope that these first courses, taught by ZCP instructors, will build awareness and demand for the CAREgivers program among the family caregiver population. Following completion of the ZCP-led sessions, we hope to train Sutter Health staff members in the delivery of the program as part of our established Train-the-Trainer program. In this way, we would ensure the sustainability of the program and continued support for family caregivers.
For more information on this project, CAREgivers, or our Train-the-Trainer program, please contact us at education@zencaregiving.org.