The health system is also talking with the community. A meeting in March at the Frontier Café in Brunswick to
talk about end-of-life care was so popular a second meeting had to be scheduled.
Mid Coast has trained many of its more than 100 hospice volunteers to go out into the community to talk one
on one about advance care planning and advance care directives. Advance care directives are forms the patient
completes, stating what sort of life-sustaining treatment they want if they cannot make their wishes known.
“Everybody should have (such) a document,” Chalmers said. “You never know.”
Other initiatives include:
• Working with the intensive care physicians to ensure that there is a documented multidisciplinary
team meeting with patients and their families to discuss advance care planning within 72 hours of their
admission to the intensive care unit;
• Training staff at nursing homes, including nursing homes not affiliated with the hospital, on POLSTs;
and
• Hosting a palliative care symposium that had 100 participants from Mid Coast Health Services and other
healthcare systems from across Maine.
Mid Coast Health Services
Darlene Chalmers discusses a Physician Order for Life-Sustaining Treatment with Dr. Florin Olteanu, MD, CMD,
medical director of the Mid Coast Senior Health Center and a a board certified geriatrician. The POLSTs are vivid
green so that they are easily seen in the medical record.
