Volunteers of America, Inc.

Project Overview

Volunteers of America (in Alexandria, Virginia), the organization that for more than 100 years has offered support to prisoners, parolees and their families, spearheaded a project to address the end-of-life care provided to the nation's men and women incarcerated in prisons. The project brought together wardens, clinicians, pastors, attorneys and inmate advocates to assess the changes needed in end-of-life care in prisons and to develop standards of hospice and palliative care for the nearly 3,000 people who die in prisons each year in America.

The project, called GRACE, in collaboration with corrections departments in New York, North Carolina, Oregon and the Federal Medical Center for Women in Texas, created in-house hospice services within their prisons and correctional institutions.

The hospice programs included state-of-the-art pain management, educational programs for corrections health staff and other corrections staff and a program to train inmates as hospice volunteers.

Other collaborators in the project included the American Correctional Association, the Center to Improve Care of the Dying and the National Prison Hospice Association. The project team developed recommended "Standards for Hospice and Palliative Care in Correctional Settings" and produced a resource manual.

Tools

• Directory of Prison End-of-Life Care Initiatives
• Caring for Terminally Ill Inmates Training Video and Guide
• End-of-Life-Care in Corrections: A Handbook for Caregivers and Managers

Resources

• Bibliography (PDF 107 KB / 3 pages)
  Download Acrobat Reader
• The Journal of Palliative Medicine (April 2004: Volume 7, No. 3) features an article about this demonstration project titled "The GRACE Project: Guiding End-of-Life Care in Corrections 1998-2001"
• Dying Inside The Walls
  Ratcliff, M. Dying inside the walls. Innovations in End-of-Life Care, 2000;2(3).
• When Death Enters Your Life: A Grief Pamphlet for People in Prisons and Jails
  By Phyllis B. Taylor and Ginette G. Ferszt.
• This demonstration project was featured at the 2003 NHPCO 5th Clinical Team Conference:
• Session 5: End of Life Care Behind Bars: A Journey in Progress
  

After the Grant

The National Commission on Correctional Health Care adopted the end-of-life standards developed by project researchers. The resource center was formally transferred to the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization (NHPCO).

Contact Information

Principal Investigator:
Margaret Ratcliff, M.S.W.
Vice President of Services
Volunteers of America
1660 Duke Street
Alexandria, VA 22314
Phone: 703.341.5039
Fax: 703.341.7001
Email: Mratcliff@voa.org

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Promoting Excellence in End-of-Life Care was a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation dedicated to long-term changes in health care institutions to substantially improve care for dying people and their families.