The Hospice Teen Volunteer Program at The Hospice of the Florida Suncoast

Abstract

In May 2000, The Hospice of the Florida Suncoast was honored with the Circle of Life Award from the American Hospital Association. The Hospice of the Florida Suncoast is a large organization with an average daily census of 1,250 patients; currently 2,800 volunteers serve in a range of programs. Located in Pinellas County, Florida, where a quarter of the population is 65 years old or older, this hospice is unusual in the degree to which they have collaborated successfully with a wide variety of community institutions to integrate care of the dying into the life of the community. The focus of the following interview is on their efforts to recruit high school students to support the activities of the hospice in a variety of ways.

Hospice Volunteer Partnership Programs Coordinator Sandra Mahood, who directs the Hospice Teen Volunteer (HTV) Program, describes the challenges of recruiting and retaining teens as well as the benefits to teens and patients when this partnership succeeds. Begun in 1994, the Florida Suncoast HTV program is unique in its size and scope, with more than 250 adolescent volunteers. One of the secrets to these high numbers has been the successful collaboration with special programs in area high schools, which require service-learning in order to graduate. At those schools, students benefit from monthly, student-run hospice council meetings with inservices and opportunities to meet with other teens who are volunteering as a sanctioned after-school activity. All teen volunteers are linked to staff volunteer coordinators who run optional intergenerational monthly volunteer support meetings. Teens who do not attend high schools with existing programs depend on monthly phone calls with the volunteer coordinator as their main means of support. This interview is excerpted from a thematic issue, "Teen Hospice Volunteers: Intergenerational Approaches to Hospice," Volume 2, Number 4, 2000 of the online journal Innovations in End-of-Life Care at www.edc.org/lastacts/