DUKE HOSPICE VOLUNTEERS
CARING FOR OUR PATIENTS, THEIR LOVED ONES, AND EACH OTHER
Duke Hospice Volunteer Newsletter
May 2012
From the desk of Gricelle Font:
Joining Duke HomeCare & Hospice’s family is a very exciting stage of my career. I have found a
home here with such a dedicated group of professionals and volunteers working together to enrich
the lives of the patients and families they serve on a daily basis. I look forward to years of service
with you and am eager to offer my years of experience in social services, medical interpreting, and
communications, some of which were with HAND (Health Arts Network @ Duke) and with the
North Carolina Clinical Translational Sciences in Chapel Hill. Chapel Hill is also my home, where I
live with my husband and our pets, Fifi and Bunky, a Cairn Terrier and a Chartreux. My 25 year old
son Ian lives and works in Florida for Merrill Lynch. When not at DHCH, I enjoy gardening,
cooking, and tennis. It was a delight to meet so many of you at the Volunteer Recognition Events
and I look forward to meeting more of you soon.
Thanks to everyone who participated in our volunteer recognition events. It was
wonderful to have a chance to network and catch up with everyone who attended.
Please know that you are all valued for the unique talents and the special kind of
caring you offer to our patients, families, staff, and community. In recognizing
hospice and palliative care volunteers for their work over the last 30 years, NHPCO
president and CEO J. Donald Schumacher stressed that these caregivers [that is,
YOU] are “angels working among us.” DHCH and their patients couldn’t agree more.
Duke Home Care & Hospice Volunteer Opportunities:
Hospice Tuck-In phone calling program. It occasionally happens that a caregiver will be so
focused on the moment or the task in front of her / him that the concept of
planning for the weekend (when many services are closed or on reduced
schedules) slips right by until there’s a problem—shortages of medications or
supplies, a foreseen but temporarily forgotten complication in the care routine,
a scheduling glitch. A new program will make sure that the patient / family gets a
call on Thursday to see how they are doing and to identify any needs for the coming
weekend. A volunteer will call from the Durham office, check in with the family, and pass
along any needs to the appropriate team member. Please give us a call if you would like to help.
Recognizing our veterans at the end of life: We are developing a new program to
recognize the service of our patients who are veterans. We are looking for volunteers
who are veterans to help us present pins and certificates to veteran patients to let
them know we value their service to our country. If you are a veteran and are
interested, please contact Carolyn. If you know vets who would be interested in this
program, please pass Carolyn’s contact information along. Nonveteran volunteers
who would like to help with this program are also welcome.
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All our programs value the volunteer support they receive and we have many requests for
additional weekday clerical support at the Durham office as well as the Bereavement Center. If
you have time to make a regular commitment, please consider these projects:
 Additional volunteers are needed to help with the monthly bereavement mailing on
the 3rd Thursday morning of each month at Unicorn Bereavement Center in
Hillsborough.
 Volunteers interested in helping with data entry projects needed at Hock Family
Pavilion and the Durham office.
 Volunteers to make customer service phone calls weekday afternoons are needed at
the Durham office. If you or someone you know might be interested in helping, give
Carolyn a call.
Volunteer Training manual update. It is time again to update the training
manual used in our patient / family support volunteer training. Several
volunteers have started to help us revise the training manual to reflect our new
procedures, policies, research, and resources. If you have ideas or suggestions
or would like to be involved in any way, please let us know.
Speaking of Patient / Family support volunteer training: Our next training class is tentatively
scheduled for the weekend of June 8-10. If you would like to work one-on-one with hospice
patients and families or know someone in the community who would, please give Carolyn a call.
Also, if you’d like to refresh your own training or share your experiences with the new recruits,
Carolyn would love to hear from you too.
Hock Family Pavilion Volunteer receptionist / ambassadors training is also coming soon. If
you or anyone you know would like to volunteer to answer phones, greet visitors, and provide
general support at HFP, please let us know so we can schedule training in late May or early
June. Because the ambassadors staff the front desk at the HFP for 12 hours a day, 7 days a
week, every day of the year, we have a continuing need for caring and compassionate people
who will be the face of Duke Hospice to every new visitor to the inpatient unit. Maybe you?
The May Admission Packet Assembly (aka PAPER SLAM!) workday will be Saturday, May
12 from 9 a.m.-noon at the Durham office. Call Carolyn if you would like to participate. This is a
low investment / high impact project we undertake almost every month to keep the paperflow in
the agency running smoothly. Please grab a friend or two and come along. Snacks are on us!
Whoops! A patio in our Hospice at the Meadowlands Adopt-a-Patio Volunteer
Program still needs to be adopted. The Meadowlands gardens are a source of
beauty and delight to our patients and their families during their time at the
Meadowlands. If you can imagine a small oasis of color, texture, and fragrance to
delight the senses and can bring that image to life, give Carolyn a call. If you are a
designer but not a planter (or vice versa), see if Carolyn can match you up with a
partner to share the work. You and our patients will be glad you did.
If you love to read and to discuss smart books with smart people, please join
the Duke Hospice book club. Please call Carolyn if you would like to
participate, help choose books for the group to read, or are willing to facilitate
this group. We have a number of interesting new books in the Volunteer
Services library. Come take a look and be inspired.
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News from the DHCH Development Department: Just a few tickets left for the
10th annual Oh, What a Night! Gala to be held Saturday, June 2, 2012, at the
Washington Duke Inn. Your $100 ticket includes dinner, dancing to the Craig
Woolard Band, drinks, and live and silent auctions filled with an array of great
(Oh, my gosh!!) trips (Aruba, New Bern, Hilton Head, Palm Beach, FL, or a
cruise), jewelry (diamond hoop earrings and custom pieces), unique
experiences, gift certificates to local upscale restaurants, original artwork, a oneof-a-kind guitar autographed by Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr (Oh, my gosh, again!!), and
much more. Spots are quickly filling up, so if you’re planning to attend, please contact Dale
Horton today at dale.horton@duke.edu or 919-479-0318 to purchase your ticket! Tables for 10
are also available for purchase. Visit www.dhch.duhs.duke.edu for more information.
CultureVision: a new resource for understanding diversity
Duke University Health System has recently subscribed to a comprehensive
database that supports culturally competent patient care to more than 50
ethnic, cultural, religious, and ability groups. Is your patient a Wiccan or
Burmese or Roma/Gypsy? There is information on all of these groups and
more. Unfortunately, this database is limited at this time to Duke computers,
but if you have questions about the ethnic or cultural practices around death
and dying of a specific patient or caregiver, give us a call and so we can find
you information that might help you better support your patient and family.
Our next Care Shawl meeting will be on Thursday, July 19, 7 to 9 p.m. at Chapel
Hill Bible Church. If you are interested in participating in a weekday group at the
Durham office, please let Carolyn know. As you may know, this is one of our most
popular volunteer activities. Some patient is waiting for your gift of love.
What happens when a patient with a diagnosis of stage IV inflammatory breast cancer that has
already spread to her spine refuses to follow the familiar path of surgery, radiation, and
chemotherapy? And she also rejects alternative remedies outside mainstream medicine? The
Diane Rehm Show of April 16, 2012, follows the story of Amy Berman, senior program officer
of the John A. Hartford Foundation, from her diagnosis 18 months ago to her journey with
palliative care for her disease. To listen to Amy’s story and the comments of Dr. Diane Meier,
director of the Center to Advance Palliative Care at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, go to
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2012-04-16/facing-death-choosing-quality-life-overaggressive-treatment
“An Evening of Mindfulness” Wednesday, May 16, 6:30-8:00 p.m. at Duke Integrative
Medicine, 3475 Erwin Rd, Durham. Experience the benefits of stress reduction with a national
leader in the field, Dr. Jeff Brantley. Enhance your ability to cope with day-to-day stress—related
to your family or your job. Reduce common physical symptoms and improve the quality of your
life. Learn skills for dealing with anxiety, depression, and other psychological
symptoms. Experience greater joy and enthusiasm for life. Registration for this
FREE event is limited. Call 919-681-2958 for more info. We would love to hear
your experiences with stress reduction techniques.
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“Is my patient Latin or Hispanic; How to tell the differences…” Friday, May 18, 9-10 a.m. at
the Durham office. Not all Spanish-speaking hospice patients and families share common
cultural experiences with each other or with most of our hospice volunteers. In this brief
presentation, Gricelle Font will discuss cultural differences (regional and continental), help you
gather information and establish trust, and communicate effectively. Learn how to support your
Spanish-speaking patients with heightened sensitivity and respect.
“Perspectives on Grief” Friday, June 22, 8:30-10:00 a.m. at the Durham
office. Kristen Register Lakis, a candidate for the M.Div. (Duke) and
M.S.W. (UNC-CH) this spring, will introduce participants to perspectives on
grief from the field of social work and the Christian tradition. This program
is intended to increase your knowledge of clinical grief theory and faithbased perspectives on grief, to increase your awareness and knowledge of
disenfranchised grief, and to increase your awareness of faith-based bereavement care.
Watch for the First-Ever National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization (NHPCO) Virtual
Conference for Volunteers and Volunteer Managers: Ignite the Future, July 30—August 3,
2012. Recognizing that the economy prevents hospice volunteers and their managers from
traveling far for continuing education and training programs, NHPCO is organizing a virtual
conference. You don’t need a plane ticket and you don’t need to pack in order to have a
wonderful opportunity to learn and network. Thursday, August 2, is specifically designed for
volunteers. Topics include spirituality at the end of life, self-compassion, non-communicative
patients and families, ethics. Save the date. And let Carolyn know if you’d like to attend.
A RESOURCE FOR YOU Continuing Education for May—“10 Suggestions for Living:
Advice from a Tibetan Hermit and My Mother” by Stan Goldberg
Dialing Reminder: All calls with a 919 area code must now be dialed using the ten-digit number.
For more information contact:
Carolyn Colsher, DHCH Volunteer Services Supervisor
(919) 479-0385 (phone) (919) 970-0227 (pager) carolyn.colsher@duke.edu
Gricelle Font, DHCH Volunteer Program Coordinator
(919) 479-0499 gricelle.font@duke.edu
Website: dhch.duhs.duke.edu
Act as if what you do matters. It does.
---William James
And thank you, as always, for everything you do for our patients and families.
Carolyn and Gricelle
Mission Statement: Duke HomeCare & Hospice will provide innovative, thoughtful care, using an interdisciplinary team approach,
to achieve the best possible outcomes for the patients, families and communities we serve.
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