Certified Family Service Coordinator: A model for professional practice and recognition
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Emergency and Critical Care, Psychiatry and Psychology, Ethical Issues, Palliative Care
- Keywords
- grief and bereavement, organ donation, listening skills, training., counseling
- Copyright
- © 2015 Stouder
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2015. Certified Family Service Coordinator: A model for professional practice and recognition. PeerJ PrePrints 3:e1617v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1617v1
Abstract
The use of the Family Service Coordinator is still a relative newcomer to the organ procurement/transplantation field. Since no comprehensive training and recognition program exists, Lifesharing, A Donate Life Organization, decided to develop a Certified Family Service Coordinator program. We defined the goals of the program as 1) to improve the care we provide to our families and increase consent for organ donation; 2) to streamline and standardize our best practices; 3) to learn new skills and improve individual understanding and practice; 4) to share our own wealth of experience; and 5) to provide professional certification and recognition. In addition, given the limitations of time and resources that affect most organ procurement organizations, we wanted to see if a comprehensive training program could be developed using resources that were easily and inexpensively acquired on the Internet.
Author Comment
This paper discusses the process of creating a training program to better equip helping professionals to work with organ donor families, typically in hospital ICU’s and Emergency Departments. Such professionals provide emotional support, referrals to community resources, and explain the option of organ donation to families who have experienced the tragic loss of their loved one.