Spring 2010: Clinicians' newsletter
Welcome to the spring edition of our Newsletter. The year got off to an excellent start with our ‘Success in Partnership Working’ award described below. Dr Richard Sloan was welcomed back from his sabbatical and has written about his meeting with colleagues in Japan at the University of Mie Hospital. We are delighted to provide details of our 20th conference ‘The Bottom Line’ later in the year. The support of our community colleagues is invaluable to us and we look forward to working with you in 2010. If any of your patients would like to know more about the Trust please direct them to this website.
Contents
- Award for Partnership Working
- Supporting bereaved children
- Hot Topics in Palliative Medicine
- Conference
- Palliative care in Japan
Award for Partnership Working
Weldmar Hospicecare Trust and Westminster Memorial Hospital (WMH) in Shaftesbury were delighted to be announced the winner in the Success in Partnership Working at NHS Dorset Health and Social Care Awards 2009/10.
The partnership working is a joint venture between Weldmar Hospicecare Trust and Westminster Memorial Hospital (Dorset Primary Care Trust) integrating palliative day hospice services into the community hospital.
Feedback from patients and carers has been very positive and the project so well supported that we have a waiting list for admission. For more information about the service please contact Claire Hart, Lead Nurse, Day Hospice on 01305 767527
Benefits of this service include:
- Reduced travelling time for patients and carers
- The new day hospice complements both the palliative care services for patients in the area given by Weldmar Specialist Palliative Care Nurses and the one-bedded palliative care suite within the hospital
- Weldmar’s Community Specialist Palliative Care Nurse, also based at WMH visits the day hospice regularly to discuss shared care patients and see others as outpatients
- Monthly OPD clinics in the Day Hospice for both day hospice and community patients from Dr Helen Parsons, Associate Specialist in Palliative Medicine
- Mutual understanding of each other’s work between day hospice staff and hospital staff
Supporting bereaved children
The Family Support Team recently held a ‘Children and Families Snowdrop Remembrance Event’. Bereaved children, related to patients who had died in the care of the Trust, attended the event at Joseph Weld Hospice in February.
The children enjoyed meeting other bereaved children, expressing their memories in art work and planting snowdrops in the hospice gardens.
The Family Support Team is now planning similar events for children and families for the future. If you would like to know more about these events please contact Jo Sharkey, Children’s Support Worker, 01305 215356
Hot Topics in Palliative Medicine
1. Launch of e-learning for End of Life Care
Access to high quality End of Life Care training is set to be transformed with the rollout of e-learning resources for huge numbers of Health and Social Care staff.
e-ELCA (End of Life Care for All) is one of the key elements in a programme to improve the skills of up to 2.5 million people working with dying people and their families. There are 60 interactive learning sessions, lasting around 20 minutes, written by experts in their field and peer reviewed.
Visit these websites for more information:
www.EndofLifeCareforAll.com
www.e-elca.org.uk
2. Assisted suicide
Doctors face a greater risk of prosecution than the public for assisting suicide under final guidelines on assisting a suicide in England and Wales produced by the Director of Public Prosecutions.
The decision to make it a factor in favour of prosecution that the suspect was a doctor, nurse or other health care professional caring for the person who committed suicide is a change from the interim policy, issued last September, which treated doctors and nurses the same as everyone else.
Ref: BMJ 2010:340:c1167
Dr Karen Steadman
Conference
Our 20th conference will be an update on bowel cancer treatment and palliative care
The conference will cover the following topics:
- Overview of where bowel cancer treatment is today
- Surgical approaches for bowel cancer
- Chemotherapy for bowel cancer
- Screening and diagnosis
- Stoma care
- The conservative management of bowel obstruction
Follow this link for more information and a booking form.
Palliative care in Japan
For six months last year I was fortunate to have been granted leave from my day job to take a sabbatical. One of the aims was to visit contacts I had made in other countries. One such contact was Yugo Narita, a consultant neurologist, who I had met at a Motor Neurone Disease conference in Japan several years ago.
In hierarchical Japan, patients revere doctors and what they say goes. Yugo is in the forefront of Japanese doctors who recognise that this subservience on the part of patients can have a down side. Many patients with MND are hitched up to a permanent ventilator when their breathing muscles become weak. Whilst this keeps them alive indefinitely, the rest of the body’s muscles continue to become paralysed. With the patient unable to communicate, they are trapped in their own bodies and totally dependent on family members and carers.
Whilst some patients definitely do want to carry on surviving as long as possible, Yugo believes that many would not, were they given the choice. He and others are leading the drive to involve patients and families in the delicate discussions over life-prolonging interventions so that they can understand both the advantages and the disadvantages and make informed choice for themselves. The principles of symptom control learnt through palliative care in the west are an alternative to ventilation in easing the distress of breathlessness.
Yugo and his nursing colleagues at the University Hospital of Mie are very keen on picking up on the skills we have learnt and encouraging the growing palliative care movement in Japan. We can all learn from each other and I am sure the links with Japan will continue.
Read a longer version of this article
Dr Richard Sloan, Medical Director
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