Palliative Care Blog

Healthcare-Related PTSD: A Story from the Front Lines

MarlaJan Wexler’s Courageous Speech at CCCC’s Annual Summit Underscored Importance of Person-Centered Care and Hard Conversations

Get a bunch of palliative care providers and advocates in a room for two days and there’s sure to be compelling stories, fascinating studies, and important information about what we should be doing to advance the field. The Coalition for Compassionate Care’s 2018 Annual Summit overflowed with that kind of wonderful content, but it also confronted what happens when compassionate care flies out the window – and how we should learn from those mistakes.

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CSUSM Campaign Asks the Big Question – What Gives Your Life Meaning?

Program Helps College Students Tackle Advance Care Planning

Nobody likes to think about dying – and talking about it can be even harder. The best way to approach the subject, many experts agree, is to start a conversation about living, and what it means to live well until the very end.

That’s the focus of “What Gives Your Life Meaning? (And Who Needs to Know),” a series of events planned this month at Cal State San Marcos highlighting the importance of advance care planning, a process designed to make sure people can make clear the treatments they want – or don’t want – if they are one day unable to communicate for themselves.

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“A” is for “April” and “Advance Care Planning”

It’s a process, not an event. It’s a conversation, not a document. It’s about values more than about decisions. This is how palliative care talks about advance care planning, in an effort to broaden the discussion beyond “getting the code.” Here’s a new one for you: It’s a covenant: A covenant to care. A solemn, binding agreement between clinicians and patients and their loved ones.

This notion comes from a slight adaptation of a passage from Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air. Paul, a star neurosurgeon just finishing residency, was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. The book captures his reflections on medicine, the meaning of caring and being cared for, and the experience of dying. Even before his diagnosis, catalyzed by the sudden death of a friend, he began to reexamine his own stance toward his work and his patients.

With my renewed focus, informed consent – the ritual by which a patient signs a piece of paper, authorizing surgery – became not a juridical exercise in naming all the risks as quickly as possible, like the voiceover in an ad for a new pharmaceutical, but an opportunity to forge a covenant with a suffering compatriot: Here we are together, and here are the ways through—I promise to guide you, as best I can, to the other side.Paul Kalanithi

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Who Do Patients Turn to for Palliative Care? The Answer Might Surprise You

Research Shows Primary Care Clinicians Are Key in Supporting People with Serious Illness

Many people diagnosed with serious illness depend on their family physician, rather than highly trained specialists, for the comfort and care that will carry them through the end of life, recent research shows.

Several studies out of University of Michigan (U-M) underscore how big a role primary care physicians have in delivering palliative care, a patient-centered approach to managing suffering and improving quality of life for people with serious or life-limiting disease. The studies also reveal a critical need among family doctors for more palliative training.

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Dr. Karl Steinberg Named Life Care’s Physician of the Year

Palliative care champion Dr. Karl Steinberg was recently named Physician of the Year for Life Care Centers of America during a ceremony held at the American Medical Directors Association Annual Conference in Grapevine, Texas. Steinberg, who serves on the National Advisory Board for the California State University Institute for Palliative Care, is medical director at Life Care Center of Vista, CA.

Founded in 1976, Life Care is a nationwide healthcare company that manages more than 200 nursing, post-acute, and Alzheimer’s centers in 28 states. Steinberg has served patients at the Vista center for more than 25 years, as an attending physician and in his current role as medical director.

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