Care & Prepare formerly CQEC

Our Vision: To foster a culture in which All people live well All their days.                    

Our Passion: Helping all our neighbors understand their healthcare rights & responsibilities has fueled our 2023 Pilot project: #ACPforALL

Our Dream: Provide All Texans with Advance Care Planning (ACP) & ability to retrieve those decisions by clinicians. 

Who We Are: Care & Prepare engages individuals, both healthy and those facing illness, in a proactive dialogue around Advance Care Planning to ensure that their wishes for end-of-life are clear and honored.

Our Mission: To stimulate end of life conversations through education.

As a provider of ACP training, we utilize evidence-based curriculum from Respecting Choices as well as
the Serious Illness Conversation Program. But as good as both those methods are, we have identified
additional material & a need to embed ACP into healthcare systems & corporations. Our bold initiative is to
implant ourselves further into Doctor's offices & in the community by developing our own value neutral, evidence-informed conversational template: Your Health. Your Way.© focusing on the unique way we interact in a more diverse environment. We've also translated our materials into Spanish: Su Salud a Su Manera© 

We seek for all to benefit - especially our BIPOC neighbors (Black, Indigenous & people of color), who may not have understood their health care rights & responsibilities. Care & Prepare participated in a study that was reported in JAMA Network May 2020. The research question was: "Can a low-cost, easily scaled, end-of-life conversation game motivate underserved African American individuals to engage in advance care planning?" Currently, less than 25% of BIPOC have ACP planning. Hence, they are less likely to have their medical care wishes known & honored. This more informal approach to ACP yielded an increase in ACP document completion. If we want to increase concordant ACP wishes & care with BIPOC, then better methods of communication are in order to decrease the disparity.

Currently, C&P is a 95% volunteer team. We have only recently engaged a part-time employee to
coordinate the volume of people trained, assist with grant writing & other communications. Ideally, we would
like to keep up with the demand of our community, but our county has grown by over 1 million in the last
decade. Of particular concern is our BIPOC neighbors, who may not have understood their health care rights
& responsibilities.

We strengthen the administration of justice in the community especially when the at-risk & BIPOC (Black,
Indigenous and people of color) are informed of their rights & responsibilities. This keeps the healthcare
decision-making authority of the patients between them and their chosen agents versus being subject to the
statutes for medical decision-making authority over them.

You can help us extend our reach by funding Care & Prepare's ACP for ALL Pilot Project.

Our Needs

Currently, we need:

• Launchpad money to start our ACP for ALL Facilitators - will seek opportunities to reach BIPOC. This will become a sustainable consulting practice through building a volume of business. 40 physicians desire our Services already, but we don't have capacity to meet the current demand. 
• Funding for creation & dissemination of Advance Care Planning materials
• Funding of operational support
• Funding for technology to help us capture individual ACP Plans so they can be available to physicians to honor those healthcare wishes

 Will you help us reach our neighbors with this important & timely information?

How you can help:

• $50 will underwrite a facilitator to 1 patient & family ACP exploration 
• $90 will help us produce 100 flyers 
• $325 First Training Scholarship for facilitator
• $650 First & Advance Training Scholarships
• $3,931.63 C&P Website & Calendaring appointments for patients integrated 
• $7,500 Facilitator Apprenticeship = a solo practitioner of ACP imbedded into a clinic
• $10,500 - CRM system to intake patient data & bill for services more efficiently