Groups Urge Developing a National Strategy for COVID-Related Grief By Larry Beresford

As America’s death toll from COVID-19 climbs past 470,000 and worldwide COVID deaths surpass 2.3 million, experts say the pandemic has transformed the landscape of loss in ways that profoundly impact our collective experience of grief. 

In late January, the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization (NHPCO) and the Social Work Hospice and Palliative Care Network (SWHPN) issued a joint call for a national bereavement response to address COVID-related grief. 

They hope to recruit other organizations to support developing a national strategy that would make bereavement support more accessible to the millions who need it. 

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Advancing Primary Palliative Care By Larry Beresford

Palliative care leaders and advocates have been warning for years that there are too few palliative specialists to support the growing number of people diagnosed with serious illnesses – and that making sure generalist clinicians have basic palliative care skills will help fill the gap.

That solution, called primary palliative care, equips frontline clinicians such as family doctors, hospitalists, and oncologists, with deeper skills in communication, pain and symptom management, and psychosocial-spiritual support – all key domains of palliative care.

If frontline clinicians can learn and implement those skills to better support patients with serious illnesses, then specialized palliative care teams can be reserved for the most difficult and complicated cases.

But getting widespread adoption by frontline physicians, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants has been challenging, experts agree. Many resist the idea they have anything to learn. Others say they’re just too busy or can’t fit any more into squeezed primary care appointments. And many still don’t understand what palliative care is and why it’s so important.

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Wishing You Light in the Darkness This Holiday Season and Always By Jennifer Moore Ballentine

On December 21, two things will happen: It is the shortest day so the longest night of the year, and for the first time in 800 years, Jupiter and Saturn will align so closely in their orbits as to form a “double planet” when viewed from Earth. The darkest night, the brightest light. What a perfect metaphor for where we are at this moment in this [insert superlative or expletive here] year.

It is also a perfect metaphor for a theme I’ve seen take shape in what we might call COVID Stories, first-hand accounts coming from frontline workers as they struggle through the now-third and most deadly wave of the pandemic: dark, very dark tales of tragedy and loss and helplessness illuminated by points of the blindingly bright light of human caring. (Here’s a perfect example.)

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What’s the Path Forward for Advance Care Planning? By Larry Beresford

Reverberations from Dr. R. Sean Morrison’s Notes from the Editor column in the June issue of the Journal of Palliative Medicine, where he described advance directives and advance care planning as “clear, simple, and wrong,” continue to echo across the field of serious illness care, raising important questions about the future of the advance care planning movement.

Following the column, UC San Francisco palliative care physician Eric Widera, MD, hosted Morrison on a GeriPal podcast and in a description about the podcast compared Morrison’s post to dropping a bomb on the field.

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Speakers at Virtual Symposium Shine Spotlight on Healthcare Inequities, Telemedicine

Addressing healthcare inequities and engaging technology to expand access to palliative care are crucial to supporting patients with serious illnesses, and collaboration is key to making that happen, said experts at this year’s Symposium Spotlights hosted by the California State University Shiley Institute for Palliative Care. 

The virtual Spotlights, Oct. 8 and Nov. 5, were held in lieu of the institute’s annual National Symposium for Palliative Care Education and Research, which couldn’t take place in person because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The impact of the novel coronavirus was referenced in the Spotlight theme, What COVID-19 Has Taught Us About Inclusive, Interprofessional, Integrative Palliative Care. Issues such as healthcare disparities and telemedicine, which have taken on new urgency during the pandemic, were explored in keynote addresses,  topic presentations, and new research presented in a Virtual Poster Gallery. 

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