Idaho Spotlight

St. Joseph Regional Medical Center

The Regence Foundation’s Sojourns™ grantmaking program promotes hospital- and community-based palliative care services. Palliative care is a medical specialty geared toward helping seriously ill patients find relief from the symptoms of their disease. Through Sojourns™, The Foundation aims to foster best practices, leadership and collaboration that help people with life-threatening and incurable illness to access quality palliative care in their own community.

To that end, the Foundation awarded $123,000 to St. Joseph Regional Medical Center in Lewiston, Idaho to support its innovative program for extending palliative care beyond the hospital to nursing homes and residential settings. The grant supports St. Joseph’s program to expand existing in-patient palliative care throughout the hospital system to nearly 600 patients in the next two years. Extending the program outside the hospital will help increase focus on patients’ quality of life instead of requiring them to be in an acute-care setting to benefit from symptom management and the interdisciplinary support palliative care offers to patients and their families.