More Helpful Advice From Previous Best Practices Summit Guests (Episode 008 - OPO Insights Podcast)

Courtney also expanded a bit on who those key members are that you need to include and onboard in the aftercare process.

So you need your key members from those teams, right? I talked about all of these external partners.

You need those team members within your organization who are the forward-facing team members to those partners to be on board, as well as their leadership.

So for example, hospital services, their manager, and then the staff member who is the liaison for that particular hospital, they need to be on board, as well as our funeral director liaison, our coroner outreach, and we actually gave those team members access to our family services module.

I know not everybody uses eye transplant.

If you have LifeLogix or eye transplant, whatever you use, consider giving them access to your aftercare notes and your aftercare interactions, you know, correspondence, updates, grief support, what are the families needing from you, And then your team is not having to do all the legwork and aftercare, right? We're small and mighty.

We do not have time for that as well.

We know it's valuable.

Somebody else can look at that.

So our hospital services team, they actually really enjoy it, Sean.

They love looking through those notes, seeing the interactions of the families, and they have their aha moment of, oh my gosh, what we're really realizing is, families aren't resistant to donation.

Although that is what is easy to kind of come across in the hospital, families are resistant to their loved ones dying.

And rightfully so, right? It's part of the grief process.

It's part of the end of life.

And we are just a small part of that and we end up being the scapegoat, right? And so if you have your partners on board and more so they are invested and they can actually look through the notes themselves, They are not also only going to know it, but then that's going to translate really great to those partnerships to where you have created internal advocates for your aftercare team within the other teams here.

A lot of the aftercare teams out there are understaffed and under-resourced, but Courtney and her team have done an amazing job of articulating to leadership at Indiana Donor Network how they are helping to grow donation and their DSA through the care that they provide to donor families.

So here is how they've accomplished that.

We, our family services team, has grown exponentially in the past couple years.

I'm sure we are not alone in that, you guys.

while typically the aftercare teams seem to stay pretty much the same size, right? But my director, we are under the same director, so I'm constantly seeing her having staffing challenges and staffing issues and the struggle of not wanting to leave a family without a family services coordinator on day two, but maybe paperwork is all done.

So how do we help alleviate that? So our aftercare team, is actually trained to go on day two at bedside to be able to support those families, not do paperwork.

We're not doing the author you, Dre, right? We are simply doing what aftercare does best.

When we are loving on them, we are walking them through meaning making.

We're able to do handprints, heartbeats, comfort shawls, whatever memory, honor walks, flag raisings, whatever they want to do for that memory making, we are able to pivot.

So right now, we are very active here in our six-bed ICU, which is next door to our headquarters, where we're able to alleviate those family services team members and say, you know what? You just got dispatched out on another case.