FREE Virtual Conference – Call for Abstracts
Call for Abstracts OPEN! Make the world your audience. The International Palliative Care Network Conference – 2013 is an online conference hosted on the Palliative Care Network Community Site. Participation and access to the virtual conference is FREE! Palliative Care professionals from all disciplines and regions of the world are encouraged to participate in presenting lectures and posters. Awards for select categories. For more details, visit www.palliativecarenetwork.com.
The Clinical Communication Collaborative (CCC) advances palliative care by fostering clinical communication practices for healthcare professionals, including nurses, physicians, social workers, chaplains, students, and other members of interprofessional healthcare teams.
We do this by providing free teaching materials on this Website to advance a patient-centered training program called COMFORT. Based on years of clinical research, COMFORT offers healthcare professionals extensive materials – PowerPoint presentations, knowledge assessments, example cases and standardized patient assessment forms – designed to teach communication strategies for patient-centered palliative care.
Communication in Palliative Nursing
Communication in Palliative Nursing unites complementary work in communication studies and nursing research to present a theoretically grounded curriculum for teaching palliative care communication to nurses. The chapters outline the COMFORT curriculum, comprised of these elements: Communication, Orientation and opportunity, Mindful presence, Family, Openings, Relating, and Team communication. Central to this curriculum is the need for nurses to practice self-care.
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Dying with Comfort
2012 Recipient of the Sue DeWine Distinguished Scholarly Book Award from the Applied Communication Division of the National Communication Association
This remarkable work reveals and follows the intimate stories of several families facing terminal illness with and without palliative care. Examining their experiences of diagnosis and care from the prism of palliative care communication, the authors use narrative description to identify the experiences of isolated, rescued, and comforted illness in an effort to reveal the deficits in our current communication and literacy practices between patient, family and clinician. With an author team comprised of three health communication scholars and one physcian certified in geriatrics and palliative medicine, this volume integrates the medical literature on palliative care with that of family and health communication researchers who advocate a simultaneous care model; one that includes curative as well as comfort care upon the diagnosis of serious, chronic or terminal illness.
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Communication As Comfort
This exceptional work explores the complexities of communication at one of the most critical stages of the life experience–during advanced, serious illness and at the end of life. Challenging the predominantly biomedical model that informs much communication between seriously ill and/or dying patients and their physicians, caregivers, and families, Sandra L. Ragan, Elaine M. Wittenberg-Lyles, Joy Goldsmith, and Sandra Sanchez-Reilly pose palliative care–medical care designed to comfort rather than to cure patients–as an antidote to the experience of most Americans at the most vulnerable juncture of their lives.
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I had a huge ‘a-ha’ moment in COMFORT. –COMFORT pre-conference attendee, American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine annual conference 2012
I have begun using it as a teaching tool with our team. –Dr. Craig Nakatsuka, Medical Director Home Health and Chief of Palliative Care, Kaiser Permanente Hawaii