No One Dies Alone

So they don't die alone
By Shari Roan, Times Staff Writer
June 4, 2007

Too many patients, too little time. Sandra Clarke, a nurse in Eugene, Ore., looked in on a patient not expected to live through the night. "Will you sit with me?" he asked.

Clark assured him that she would, but that first she had to check on her other patients. Ninety minutes later, she hurried back to the man's room — only to discover he had died.

"I felt like I had let him down," says Clarke, of Sacred Heart Medical Center. "Here you are in a high-tech world in medicine and he only asked for something very simple. It seemed so wrong to me. I felt guilty and frustrated. It wasn't that anyone had done anything wrong. But it wasn't done right."

Those feelings of responsibility and compassion — from Clarke and from other patient advocates — have given birth to a movement spreading to U.S. hospitals across the nation. The goal: to ensure every patient has a fellow human being at his or her bedside at the time of death.

Among the efforts is No One Dies Alone, a program Clarke later helped create. The program, begun in 2001, relies on volunteers to sit with terminally ill patients and has since spread to several hundred hospitals, including St. Joseph Hospital in Orange and its sister institution Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo. St. John's Health Center in Santa Monica will launch the program this month.

One of the oldest such programs, Twilight Brigade, Compassion in Action, specifically serves veterans at Veterans Affairs hospitals and nursing homes across the country.

And Sacred Dying, begun in 2000 in San Francisco, trains organizations such as hospices and churches how to provide a spiritual atmosphere for people who might otherwise die alone.

...