The Chronic Care Clinic is an integrated, collaborative initiative created to address the holistic needs of patients with over-utilization of emergency department services. The 9-12-month intervention examined social determinants of health and targeted increasing health literacy, developing self-management skills via behavioral health intervention, community resource connection and successful health system navigation along with a focus on disease-specific goals. Patients who successfully engaged and achieved at least 50% of their established goals participated in a graduation ceremony.
 
One patient wrote, “They helped me with my health, they helped me find a job, they helped me find a place to live. When I joined this clinic, I felt like I wasn’t lost in the world anymore.”

Led by Founding Director Dr. Jenny Seham, AIM is a program in Montefiore Medical Center’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science with initiatives in the Child Outpatient Division (COPD) and the availability for consultation, assessment, intervention, and training throughout the Montefiore Healthcare systems. AIM offers arts and integrative interventions including music, dance, photography, drawing, poetry, yoga, gardening, and technology. AIM begins with a foundation of evidence-based psychiatric practices, engages with the community with goals to create positive change in the environment of care and in the mental wellness of patients, their families and hospital staff.
 
One colleague noted, “…I watched these youths develop newfound confidence, improved self-esteem, and a sense of worth in a way I have never witnessed.”

The 3 Wishes Project (3WP) was developed to bring peace to a patient’s final days and to comfort families. The goal of this end of-life program is to improve the quality of the dying experience for patients, their families and clinicians, by dignifying the patients and honoring their lives in order to ease the grief for others left behind. This is achieved in the 3WP by initiating conversations to learn more holistically about patients and their families, then eliciting and implementing wishes that are important and meaningful to them. These acts of compassion have been classified in 12 categories: facilitating connections, celebrations involving food/beverage, humanizing the patient, personalizing the ICU room, family care, music, religious rituals and spiritual ceremonies, preparations and final arrangements, word clouds, keepsakes and tributes, organ and tissue donation, and “paying it forward.”
 
As a daughter of a dying patient posted on Facebook an image of the card with dozens of notes from clinicians caring for her father, “This is what kindness looks like.”