Renowned palliative care physicians Dr. BJ Miller and Dr. Ira Byock are featured on ‘Hear Me Now.’

LOS ANGELES/NEW YORK – StoryCorps, the largest oral history project of its kind, and the Providence Institute for Human Caring have launched “Hear Me Now,” an enlightened storytelling and listening initiative to “re-soul” healthcare.

The Institute for Human Caring invites the public in Los Angeles, Anchorage, Alaska, and Missoula, Mont., to share healthcare-related stories for posterity.

As part of Hear Me Now, StoryCorps provides Providence staff and volunteers with tools and training to record StoryCorps-style conversations among patients, their families, and care providers.

Recording a StoryCorps interview is easy: Invite a loved one, or anyone else you choose, for an uninterrupted 40-minute conversation, guided by a trained facilitator.

At the end of the session, you walk away with a copy of the interview, and a digital file goes to the Library of Congress, where it’s preserved for generations.

Hear Me Now represents an expression of whole person care – care that offers state-of-the-art medical treatment, with an emphasis on the emotional, physical, social and spiritual experience and personal priorities of people Providence St. Joseph Health serves.

The Hear Me Now website has a trove of poignant audio clips, edited in the signature StoryCorps style. Currently operating in Southern California, Alaska and Montana, Hear Me Now in partnership with StoryCorps will expand to other regions Providence St. Joseph Health serves, including Oregon and Washington.

“We’re so pleased to work with the Providence Institute for Human Caring to showcase the transformative power of storytelling, offering a potential for catharsis, not only for patients and their families, but also for the medical professionals who tend to them,” said Dave Isay, StoryCorps founder and president.

Isay is among the keynote speakers at the 2017 Catholic Health Assembly, June 11, in New Orleans, where he will discuss StoryCorps and its partnership with Providence and other healthcare providers.

Research has documented:

– Storytelling can improve health knowledge and behaviors

– Storytelling helped medical students develop a deeper understanding of patients with dementia

– Storytelling helped patients cope with cancer

“Hear Me Now creates a sacred space for people to connect with each other in meaningful and deeply satisfying ways,” said Ira Byock, M.D., founder and chief medical officer of the Institute for Human Caring.

“Within the context of a modern health system, we’re attempting to foster a culture of whole person caring that allows us to honor and celebrate the fullness of human life – its joys, its triumphs, but also the hard times of illness, dying, and grieving,” Byock said.

For more information about how to participate in Hear Me Now, contact Lindsay Flacks at 310-543-7263 or Lindsay.Flacks@providence.org.