Know a hot young palliative care researcher? Or perhaps you ARE a hot young palliative care researcher?
You might be interested to investigate this award for early palliative care researchers. There are other awards for post docs and for clinical research
http://www.eapcnet.eu/research2016/
You will have to get your proverbial skates on as applications close 13th December. The EAPC research congress is in Dublin in June 2016.
Is it just me or is there more discussion about death and dying in the media than usual? Perhaps we can be encouraged that we as a community are becoming more aware of issues around dying, and better able to discuss things that are important before it’s too late.
Here’s an article from today’s Age about how the writer’s mother was able to express her dying wishes and say goodbye.
Thanks to our colleagues at Palliative Care News for this article
Source: Main predictors of death at home
And we are back! After our very successful inaugural tweet chat last month, let’s rock again with our next effort, and Let’s talk about death, baby together with Palliative Care Australia.
A tweet chat is a virtual meeting on twitter. This chat has the hashtag #pallANZ. Remember to use this hashtag in all your tweets, otherwise people will miss your comment. If you are not familiar with tweet chats, check out our Twitter 101 and 102 articles on this site.
Victorians are being urged to have their say about the services they want to support them at the end of their and their loved ones’ lives.
Many people with a life-limiting illness die in hospital, when they would have preferred to die at home. Figures show that up to 70 per cent of Australians would prefer to die at home, but only 14 per cent actually do so.
A new Discussion Paper – Greater Say for Victorians: Improving End of Life Care – has been released, and consultation will be undertaken in coming months with health professionals, carers, families and members of the community to develop a new state-wide end of life care framework.
Pop in here http://www.betterendoflife.vic.gov.au to have a look at how you can contribute! Let us know in the comments what you think.
Love, sonia
This really resonated with me… well worth a read.
A young doctor describing her developing perspective on a “good death”; on dying and end of life care in our healthcare system.
http://www.vox.com/2015/10/19/9554583/doctor-good-death
Sonia
Palliverse loves a bit of #SoMe interacting with palliative care discussions.
If we have not converted you to tweet chats yet, check out this transcript of the healthcare leaders weekly tweet chat which comes out of North America on a Wednesday 1130 AEDT. This week it was on Palliative Care (yay) but it’s often about change, innovation and patient experience in heath.
It highlighted again for me the differences between palliative care in the USA and in Australia and New Zealand. I know from hanging out on tweet chats out of the USA that often you must sign up to forgo all active treatments in order to qualify for hospice care.
I gave NZ a plug as an example of a country with a good palliative care system (ahead of Aus cos I think NZ is better with community palliative care integration.) Was I right or wrong? What do you think?
Sonia xx
The International Association for Hospice and Palliative Care (IAHPC) is pleased to announce 15 scholarships from the IAHPC Traveling Scholarship Program, to help support the travel of palliative care workers in developing countries to the VIII Congress of the Latin American Association for Palliative Care (Asociacion Latinoamericana de Cuidados Paliativos – ALCP).
The ALCP Congress will take place at the Hotel Royal Pedregal in Mexico City, Mexico, April 14-16, 2016.
Applicants must be living in a developing country, be active members of IAHPC and of ALCP, and actively working in palliative care. Applications from physicians, nurses, psychologists and other disciplines are welcome.
If you wish to apply for the Traveling Scholarship and are not member of IAHPC or ALCP, you may join through the corresponding websites:
Applications to the IAHPC Traveling Scholarship are available through the IAHPC website
Preference will be given to individuals who have not received an IAHPC grant in the past three years with accepted poster or oral presentations in the Congress and to individuals living and working in developing countries in the Latin American and Caribbean Region. If applicable, please send proof of acceptance of the poster or oral presentation, along with a copy of your current CV. Selected grantees will also be eligible to receive a discounted registration fee from the Congress.
Deadline to apply is December 31st, 2015. Results will be announced by January 2016.
Additional information about the ALCP Congress can be found in the congress website.
Greetings from Munich (Grusse aus Munchen)
The morning session was an opportunity to share advance care planning (ACP) success stories from different countries – Singapore (Living Matters), UK (Gold Standard Framework) and the US (Honoring Choices Wisconsin, Kaiser Permanente). Helen Mason from NZ also presented the findings of her Harkness Fellowship, identifying key components of health systems for successful ACP.
To me, the recurring themes were:
– the need for grassroots, community engagement
– identifying and using clinical and community champions of ACP
– the need for a coordinated whole systems approach
– not limiting ACP to end of life – focus on living well, not just dying, and
– employing continuous quality improvement.
In the spirit of the #ACPEL2015 conference coming up soon, I was reminded of this randomised controlled trial done in Australia about the impact of advance care planning.
309 legally competent medical inpatients aged 80 or more were randomised to “normal care” or “normal care plus advance care planning” and followed for six months or until death. The main outcome measure was whether wishes were known and respected in the patients who had died.
Of the 56 patients who died by six months, end of life wishes were much more likely to be known and followed in the intervention group (25/29, 86%) compared with the control group (8/27, 30%; P<0.001). In the intervention group, family members of patients who died had significantly less stress (intervention 5, control 15; P<0.001), anxiety (intervention 0, control 3; P=0.02), and depression (intervention 0, control 5; P=0.002) than those of the control patients. Patient and family satisfaction was higher in the intervention group.
The authors concluded that “Advance care planning improves end of life care and patient and family satisfaction and reduces stress, anxiety, and depression in surviving relatives.”
palliverse.com 