Make A Difference

In this podcast Chris interviews Andy Baxter, the founder of the Cunniff-Dixon Foundation. 

The Cunniff-Dixon Foundation was founded out of Andy’s endeavor to make a difference after having experienced one of life’s greatest challenges.  His wife Carley died after a three-year battle with breast cancer.  Reflecting on that experience as he talked to others Andy realized his wife’s experience of care and passing peacefully at home was a unique one thankfully due to the oncologist they were blessed with Dr. Peter Dixon.  Hence the Dixon in the Cunniff-Dixon Foundation name.  

Andy shares that story and the focus and mission of the foundation including some of their more recent work in the area of Advanced Directives with their co-developed tool “Planning my Way.”  Andy also pays forward to hospice and palliative care professionals what he learned during his wife’s illness as well the learning from his foundation’s great work in the hospice and palliative care space.  

Andy has great wisdom to share so tune in because there are some great pearls in this episode of “TCNtalks.” Join us. 

Our Guest

Andy Baxter
Founder - The Cunniff-Dixon Foundation
www.cunniffdixon.org

Bio

Matthew A. (Andy) Baxter was born in New York City in 1942, and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. After graduating from Yale University and the Amos Tuck School of Business, he had a career in finance in New York. In 2005, his wife Carley Cunniff died from breast cancer. Baxter created the Cunniff-Dixon Foundation, honoring his late wife and Dr. Peter Dixon, the physician who had guided Andy and Carley through the last stages of her life.

The mission of Cunniff-Dixon is to enrich the physician-patient relationship at the end of life, to educate individual physicians and inspire them to provide the kind of care at the end of life that we all wish for ourselves and our loved ones. 

To that end, the foundation has sponsored continuing medical education symposiums on end-of-life care, has co-sponsored with The American College of Surgeons a curriculum on end-of-life care for surgical residents, and has sponsored the Hastings Cunniff-Dixon Physician awards. Since 2007, these awards have been given to 39 physicians from across the United States. The awards are now granted every other year, with 3 awards to early career physicians, and 1 each to a mid-career physician and a senior clinician. The recipients of these awards, together with the selection committee that determines the recipients, collectively represent the best and the brightest of palliative care leadership in this country, and perhaps the world.

Since 2018, the Foundation has been working on its contribution to advance care planning. Planning My Way ….A Guide for Future Health Care Decisions is an educational resource designed to help patients and patient families with advance care planning.