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April 18, 2013   ·   0 Comments

On April 4 th, I joined 16 other folks for the first class of 6 in a course called Chronic Disease Self Management. The course is for people living with any chronic illness and is a collaboration between Matthews House Hospice, Stevenson Memorial Hospital and Southlake Regional Health Centre. Staff at Stanford University developed the program and it has been adapted for Canada as has an extremely helpful course text, Living a Healthy Life with Chronic Conditions. The course and all materials are free and it is currently running Thursday afternoons at Matthews House.

I enrolled as a support for my client … hospice friend, who signed up early and was eagerly anticipating the course start-up. I learned very quickly that I have a couple of the conditions and their attendant challenges …  mild, but still there, so I now have two reasons to be there.

The course is interactive and our two well trained instructors facilitated a number of sharing sessions starting with introducing ourselves and describing briefly our conditions. A session like this helps because you learn the incredible challenges some live with that puts our own situations into perspective. We shared our symptoms and the instructors demonstrated that regardless of your chronic disease, many of the symptoms are similar. These symptoms can trigger others in what they called the Vicious Cycle of Symptoms. They introduced us to what they called our self management “Tool Box” and led us through some of the suggested self help techniques.

Another important idea introduced was how to develop a short term Action Plan working towards achieving a Goal. With a partner, we each created a plan that we were committed to carry out before next class. The instructors outlined the characteristics of a successful plan … something we want to do, that is reasonable and achievable and is behavior specific. Our plan had to answer the key questions … what, how much, when and frequency. When we shared our plan, we had to indicate on a scale of 1 – 10 how confident we were in achieving our goal. If we had a low confidence level or our plan was not behavior based, the leaders helped us change it so we would not be setting ourselves up to fail. Our final assignment was to read chapters 1,2 and 5 in the text which expanded on what we learned in session 1.

I am looking forward to finishing the course, for me and for my hospice friend.  We are all hoping we will be much better prepared to self-manage our chronic diseases or help those for whom we provide care. The success of this first course means it will be offered again. Please watch for details.

The Hike for Hospice on Sunday May 5 is approaching fast … a guaranteed fun day for family and friends. Our second annual Hospice Golf Tournament follows quickly on May 9 at Nottawasaga Resort. For details on how you can become involved, or information on our programs and services, please check our website, www.matthewshousehospice.ca   I hope you will.

By Frank Taylor

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