'Re-souling' healthcare through storytelling
LOS ANGELES and NEW YORK, June 8, 2017 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- StoryCorps, the largest oral history project of its kind, and the Providence Institute for Human Caring, announce Hear Me Now, an enlightened storytelling and listening initiative to "re-soul" healthcare.
The Institute for Human Caring invites the public in Los Angeles, Anchorage, Alaska, and Missoula, Mont., to share healthcare-related stories for posterity.
As part of Hear Me Now StoryCorps provides Providence staff and volunteers with tools and training to record StoryCorps-style conversations among patients, their families, and care providers. Recording a StoryCorps interview is easy: Invite a loved one, or anyone else you choose, for an uninterrupted 40-minute conversation, guided by a trained facilitator. At the end of the session, you walk away with a copy of the interview, and a digital file goes to the Library of Congress, where it's preserved for generations.
Hear Me Now represents an expression of whole person care – care that offers state-of-the-art medical treatment, with an emphasis on the emotional, physical, social, and spiritual experience and personal priorities of people Providence St. Joseph Health serves.
The Hear Me Now website has a trove of poignant audio clips, edited in the signature StoryCorps style. Currently operating in Southern California, Alaska and Montana, Hear Me Now in partnership with StoryCorps will expand to other regions Providence St. Joseph Health serves, including Oregon and Washington.
"We're so pleased to work with the Providence Institute for Human Caring to showcase the transformative power of storytelling, offering a potential for catharsis, not only for patients and their families, but also for the medical professionals who tend to them," said Dave Isay, StoryCorps founder and president.
Isay is among the keynote speakers at the 2017 Catholic Health Assembly, June 11, in New Orleans, where he will discuss StoryCorps and its partnership with Providence and other healthcare providers.
Research has documented:
- Storytelling can improve health knowledge and behaviors
- Storytelling helped medical students develop a deeper understanding of patients with dementia
- Storytelling helped patients cope with cancer
"Hear Me Now creates a sacred space for people to connect with each other in meaningful and deeply satisfying ways," said Ira Byock, M.D., founder and chief medical officer of the Institute for Human Caring. "Within the context of a modern health system, we're attempting to foster a culture of whole person caring that allows us to honor and celebrate the fullness of human life – its joys, its triumphs, but also the hard times of illness, dying, and grieving."
For more information about how to participate in Hear Me Now, contact Lindsay Flacks, 310-543-7263; [email protected]
@Human_Caring #HearMeNow
About the Providence Institute for Human Caring:
The Providence Institute for Human Caring seeks to transform health care and strengthen ties to the communities Providence Saint Joseph Health serves. We are clinicians, educators, and health systems experts who believe everyone deserves the best care possible for physical health as well as for emotional, social and spiritual well-being. The Institute's goal: change health care culture to make caring for whole persons and their families the new normal. Serious illness not only affects people physically, it frequently robs them of their sense of security. People living with life-threatening medical conditions often say they feel lonely, frightened, confused and depressed. Whole person care melds state-of-the-art diagnostics and treatment with expertise and services to address their emotional, social and spiritual needs.
About StoryCorps:
Founded in 2003 by Dave Isay, StoryCorps has given more than 400,000 people—Americans of all backgrounds and beliefs, in towns and cities in all 50 states—the chance to record interviews about their lives. The organization preserves the recordings in its archive at the Library of Congress, the largest single collection of human voices ever gathered, and shares select stories with the public through StoryCorps' weekly podcast, NPR broadcasts, animated shorts, digital platforms, and best-selling books. These powerful human stories reflect the vast range of American experiences, wisdom and values; engender empathy and connection; and remind us how much more we have in common than divides us. Learn more at storycorps.org
SOURCE Providence Institute for Human Caring
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