Understanding Options - Palliative Care, Hospice & Living Well Workshop - Hybrid 4 PM

Workshop Description:

This workshop will introduce key concepts in palliative care and how it relates to full treatment and hospice care. You will learn about important advance care planning tools—including POLST, Advance Healthcare Directives, Living Wills, and Medical Power of Attorney—and how they differ. The session will also offer practical tips for discussing treatment options, goals of care, and quality of life with your medical team.

Please submit questions and/or disuccsion points you'd like the presenter to cover here. Impromptu questions are always welcomed too!

Our classes and programs are funded by grants, sponsors, donors and clients who are paying it forward. Cancer can be expensive; we do not want finances to be a barrier to accessing our valuable programming. Pay-as-you-can with a suggested donation amount per class of $10-$25.

About the Facilitator: 

In his 43 years as a practicing physician, Dr. Jay Draeger has become an expert in guiding, advising, and educating patients with serious life-threatening illnesses as they and their loved ones navigate the choppy waters of treatment options, goals of care, and quality of life.

After surviving medical school in Wisconsin and then residency in San Francisco, where he was fortunate to meet his long-suffering, ever supportive, and very lovely wife, he became board certified in Internal Medicine, Geriatric Medicine, as well as Hospice and Palliative Medicine.

For 35 years he was both in private practice in Folsom, and on the active medical staff treating patients at Mercy Hospital of Folsom. For decades he served as chairman of the hospital’s BioEthics Committee and as medical director of its Palliative Care Service. He was a member of the California POLST Physician Leadership Council, and for the last 8 years he has also been a team physician for Snowline Hospice.

We welcome Dr. Draeger here to discuss the relationship of Palliative Care to Hospice Care, and to answer questions about the broad range of Advance Care Planning, POLST, goals-of-care, ethics, and quality-of-life decisions in serious illnesses.