Center to Advance Palliative Care (CAPC) Celebrates 20th Anniversary
The year 2019 marks the 20th anniversary of the Center to Advance Palliative Care (CAPC). During this time palliative care has seen soaring growth.
“Founded in 1999 with a significant multiyear grant from the RWJF, CAPC launched with an explicit charge to scale access to palliative care nationwide,” said CAPC Director, Diane E. Meier, MD. “To that end, for 20 years we have been dedicated to disseminating tools, training, and technical assistance to standardize best practice and promote access to high-quality, sustainable palliative care in all health care settings.”
Since its inception, palliative care has seen soaring growth in the US. Over the past 16 years, the percentage of hospitals (50 or more beds) with a palliative care program has tripled. Over 75% of hospitals have a palliative care team today as compared to only 25% in 2000.
CAPC’s focus on technical assistance and dissemination of knowledge and skill to the field reduced the opportunity cost of program start-up and helped stimulate rapid growth in the numbers and quality of palliative care programs nationwide. This was accelerated by a focus on professionalism and standardization through the CAPC Model and the Palliative Care Leadership Centers™ (PCLC) – examples of diffusion on innovation in healthcare.
As a result, palliative care programs and their leaders had increased capacity to demonstrate care quality as well as financial outcomes for their institutions. This in turn drove executives’ commitment to palliative care.
Kicking off its anniversary, CAPC is launching Project Tipping Point - a national 5-year campaign aimed at creating exponential improvement in the care quality delivered to millions in the US who live with a serious illness. To kick off the campaign, CAPC is also launching the Tipping Point Challenge, a competition to catalyze the spread of knowledge and skills among palliative care specialists and non-palliative care specialists alike.
CAPC became a membership organization in 2015 to scale its model of health care innovation, and it now serves more than 1,300 health care organization members.
ABOUT CAPC
The Center to Advance Palliative Care (CAPC) is a national, nonprofit organization dedicated to increasing the availability of quality health care for people living with serious illness. It provides health care professionals and organizations with the training, tools, technical assistance, and metrics necessary to redesign care systems that effectively meet this need. CAPC is part of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, in New York City. To learn more about CAPC, the Project Tipping Point campaign, and the Tipping Point Challenge, visit capc.org.
Contact: John Zoccola at 267.664.2759 or [email protected]