Share Your Story!
The Palliative Care Institute is developing a new website -- WHATCOMCARES.ORG -- to provide better access to services in Whatcom County for those living with long-term chronic or serious illness or facing end-of-life. We recognize that there are already many resources in our community to serve this population, but also notice that those needing services often have difficulty finding the right resources.
The website has three major sections: RESOURCES, LIBRARY, STORIES to link patients and their families to traditional inpatient and outpatient palliative and end-of-life care, complementary and alternative care, spiritual care, and other ancillary services or supports, both formal and informal. We are including a library and other informational videos and articles related to serious illness and end-of-life and stories from our community.
We plan to launch the site early in June and invite you to share your stories about serious illness or end-of-life.
TEXT TO OPEN THE STORIES SECTION:
We use stories to make sense of our world and to share that understanding with others. Our experiences – as patients, family members or caregivers – with the onset and ongoing management of serious illness, and the impact illness has on our relationships is the stuff of stories. In fact, these stories help us make sense of the illness experience. In the medical landscape where the illness is typically described as a diagnostic label or a treatment plan, these narratives can reframe our frustrations, explore the questions and paradoxes of suffering and capture the meaning of the lived experience.
We welcome engaging and interesting guest stories related to serious illness care and end-of-life experiences in all their forms. Our blog is geared to raise awareness about all aspects of palliative and end-of-life care.
Please note, we do not have funding to pay guest bloggers. If you wish to submit a guest post, send us a draft of your post. Our committee will review your post to determine if this blog topic meets the criteria for inclusion. We may simply post it or perhaps return your article for a revision or rewrite if we think it could be more appealing to our readers.
Instructions for submitting a blog post:
- Post length should not exceed 500 to 900 words, although a longer article will be considered if the topic is unusually compelling.
- The content of the post must deal with key themes of this website. We are especially interested in stories that bring a personal perspective to these themes. We do not welcome rants or rages.
- Guest posts must be original (written by you or with a co-author) and may not have been published online elsewhere, unless they have been revised, expanded and rewritten.
- You may include a high-quality short video with your article; it should have been already uploaded on to YouTube or Vimeo.
- Permissions:
- If you quote or reference someone else’s work, full credit must be provided. Please fact check, reference original sources, and where appropriate, include links in the body of your post.
- Where appropriate, you must have obtained permission from other living people who feature in your story or for any materials and photos used.
- Include a short author bio (2-3 sentences) with your photo (JPG format preferred) and up to two links that might appear in your bio at the bottom of your blog article (website, social media profile, and/or your own blog.) Please include any other information that can help us learn about you and your work. (Your website name, Facebook or other social media pages, Amazon author page)
- Please note: we do not allow any advertising on our blog.
- If we publish your guest post, you will retain copyright of your post. You are free to reblog the post, but we ask that you link back to our page where your guest post is featured, and mention that the post was originally published on whatcomcares.org.
Send your proposed post to Marie Eaton -- pci@wwu.edu