About the CCT

 

You know how to screen the soul too, which I say is a good thing because many helping people do not know how to do this.

            A Patient with advanced Congestive Heart Failure

 

The Comprehensive Care Team (CCT) was a three-year demonstration project to explore how care might be improved for patients facing advanced illness, including those at the end of life.  The CCT provided consultation, education, and clinical health services from 1998-2001 and is currently working to assess its effect on patient well-being and how the project’s successes might be incorporated into regular medical care.

 

We endeavored to practice according to the principles embodied in our mission statement:

“The CCT is a community of multidisciplinary professionals.  The CCT provides support to patients with serious illness—and to their caregivers—by encouraging the physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being of each individual.  We strive for excellence in the provision of care in an environment of open communication, honest information, mutual respect, compassion, creativity, and integrity.  We offer the best scientific care thoughtfully integrated with an innovative, educational approach to healing.”

 

The CCT operated with the belief that most patients with serious chronic illness or with cancer benefit from a combination of working to treat their disease along with scrupulous attention to the relief of symptoms and suffering.  We believe that many patients with end-stage illness benefit from recognizing that they may be at the “beginning” of the end of their lives.  This recognition allows for emotional, interpersonal, and spiritual growth, even when cure of disease is not possible.

 

The CCT project involved 50 patients, their families, and their primary care physicians in the General Medicine Practice at the University of California, San Francisco.   The Team included a social worker, physicians, nurses, medical and pharmacy students, a chaplain, a psychologist, a pharmacist, a project coordinator, and an artist.

 

The CCT project and this website have been supported by the Division of General Internal Medicine at UCSF and have received major funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s program “Promoting Excellence in End of Life Care.”

 

This website and the artwork presented here are dedicated to the patients and families who shared their stories and lives with us and offer us all the privilege of bearing witness to grace and triumph in the face of our inevitable mortality.

 

On behalf of the entire team,

Michael W. Rabow, MD

Director

The Comprehensive Care Team