Easing the Challenges of Living with Dementia: How Palliative Care & Hospice Can Improve Quality of Life

Dr. Grant Smith is a palliative care physician and Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Stanford School of Medicine. He is the medical director of the Stanford Palliative Care Center of Excellence (PCCOE) Community Partnerships Team, and he is the lead for quality improvement in advance care planning in the Division of Primary Care and Population Health. As part of the Stanford faculty, he is an attending on the palliative care inpatient service and as a provider in the outpatient palliative care clinic in Palo Alto.

Dr. Carla Perissinotto is board certified in internal medicine, geriatrics, and palliative medicine. She served as the associate chief for geriatrics clinical programs at UCSF from 2017 to 2021. In this role she oversaw and developed new clinical programs serving older adults across care settings. For over a decade she has worked in home-based primary care. More recently, she has begun working with VITAS hospice as an associate medical director, working to rethink how we care for patients with terminal dementia. Dr. Perissinotto has gained national and international recognition for her research on the effects of loneliness on the health of older adults. Her research and advocacy has focused on integration of loneliness assessments in health care, and evaluation and implementation of community-based programs focused on ameliorating loneliness and isolation in adults.

Jeong Min Jung is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with the Outpatient Palliative Medicine Clinic at Stanford Health Care. She has over 15 years of experience in Palliative Medicine and Hospice and holds an Advanced Palliative Hospice Social Worker certification (APHSW-C). She received her undergraduate degree at University of California, Los Angeles with a full athletic scholarship and a master’s degree in social work at the Columbia School of Social Work.

Naomi Tzril Saks serves as an adult inpatient clinical health care chaplain at Parnassus Heights campus with the Division of Palliative Medicine at University of California, San Francisco and is an ordained Rabbinic Pastor. Her work is inspired and informed by integrated, contemplative and somatic approaches to wellbeing, cultural and spiritual humility, and health care equity, and transdisciplinary collaboration and education.