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Description: The latest news on quality improvement for care for the dying.
Last Update: 23:07:18 03/05/2006
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Additional Info
First Fetched: 00:16:39 01/31/2004
Last Updated: 23:07:18 03/05/2006
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The Hospice Foundation of America's 11th Annual National Bereavement Teleconference will focus on Living With Grief: Alzheimer's Disease. The teleconference will be broadcast on April 28, 2004. Now is the time to begin planning how your facility can participate as a downlink site. For information on how to participate call HFA at 800-854-3402. Full information and a registration form will be available in October on the HFA web site.
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Originally created as three, hour-long audio documentaries for national radio broadcast, this wonderful education resource is now available on CD. It will make a great training tool for hospice volunteers, health care professionals, and anyone else who wants to learn about key issues in end-of-life care in an entertaining, easy-to-absorb format. The series draws from over 80 hours of tape and includes remarkable moments with people who are facing death, their families and those who are helping them along the journey. While the stories are personal, the themes are universal as we all struggle to come to terms with the passing of friends, family members, and ultimately, ourselves. It examines the barriers to good care that arise from cultural misunderstanding, from fear over the use of morphine and other drugs, and from lack of funding to pay for good programs. It provides ideas, examples and inspiration for those who are searching for a good path on the journey to death.
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A new study documents disturbing failures in the quality of end-of-life care for many Americans, particularly for those who die in institutional settings. On the positive side, it shows that hospice can significantly improve the quality of care. Family members of patients receiving hospice services were more satisfied with overall quality of care, with 70.7% rating care as "excellent" compared with less than 50% of those dying in an institutional setting or with home health services. Citation: JAMA. 2004;291:88-93. "Family Perspectives on End-of-Life Care at the Last Place of Care" Joan M. Teno, MD, et al.
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This book is a practical, people-oriented sourcebook for adults who find themselves taking care of their parents. With medical science constantly extending life expectancy, baby boomers face a large-scale problem of caring for elderly parents. This book gives you a simple yet systematic roadmap for developing and carrying out a care plan.
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ABC's "Nightline" program featured end-of-life issues on Wednesday, December 10, 2003. The program included an interview with Laura Schmidt, a long-time member of Americans for Better Care of the Dying (ABCD). Laura, a writer, is chronicling her experience with pancreatic cancer. Other interviews included her husband, Joe, and expert Joanne Lynn, M.D. Read Laura's own journal by clicking the title of this story.
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This two-CD collection of music and contemplative readings exploring the human experience with mortality. A good resource to keep on hand for use with patients, staff members, or hospice volunteers who are open to the use of music as way of tapping feelings about dying.
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In this interview by Les Morgan of Growth House, Carol Barker, RN, PhD, explains how telemedicine can be used to increase access and improve care quality for hospice clients over broad geographic areas in a cost-effective manner. In addition to use in individual patient homes, it can be used in long-term institutional settings such as nursing homes. Carol is Director of Education and Research at the Hospice of Michigan, which uses TeleHospice in both rural and urban settings. Les is an expert on the use of information systems for end-of-life care. The interview covers what TeleHospice is, costs and benefits, funding ideas, implementation strategies, and where hospice telemedicine is going.
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Howard University College of Medicine and The Initative to Improve Palliative Care for African Americans (IIPCA) will host a National Conference titled "The Last Miles of The Way Home" on February 26-28, 2004 in Atlanta, Georgia. IIPCA was formed to define and promote a research, education, and policy agenda for the improvement of care for African American patients facing serious illness. For more information wisit www.iipca.org.
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Montefiore Medical Center's Department of Family Medicine (Bronx, New York) has announced a Palliative Care Fellowship program which will start July, 2004. The fellowship is open to residents who have satisfactorily completed an ACGME residency program in internal medicine, family medicine, anesthesia, neurology or physical medicine and rehabilitation. Trainees will rotate through the in-patient palliative care suite, the in-patient consultation service and the outpatient pain and palliative care clinic. Applicants should contact Dr. Sean O'Mahony via email at somahony@montefiore.org or by calling 718-920-6378.
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Read a new essay by Bruce Jennings exploring the tough issues surrounding under-utiliation of hospice services by persons affected by late-stage Alzheimer Disease. AD was listed on the death certificates of only 23,000 of the 2.5 million people who died last year. But in fact many more than that, maybe as many as 100,000 actually died with Alzheimer's. No one knows for sure how many AD patients are enrolled in hospice programs each year, but a good estimate is that about 7 percent of the nation's hospice patients are individuals with dementia.
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The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Hospice and Palliative Care Initiative (VAHPC) has launched an effort to develop a national network of active Hospice-Veteran Partnerships comprised of VA facilities, local hospices and community organizations working together to ensure that excellent end-of-life care is available for veterans in the United States. Established at the state or regional level, the partnerships can strengthen the relationships between VA and community hospice providers as well as conduct outreach campaigns to educate veterans and their families about hospice and palliative care. To see how your organization can get involved, download the Hospice-Veteran Partnership Toolkit.
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Although today the public all too often associates dementia symptoms with Alzheimer's disease, the medical profession can now distinguish various types of "other" dementias that also undermine cognitive abilities, often with onset at a younger age. This book is the first comprehensive guide dealing with frontotemporal dementia (FTD), one of the largest groups of non-Alzheimer's dementias. The contributors to this book are either specialists in their fields or have exceptional hands-on experience with FTD sufferers.
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