High quality comprehensive palliative care is a critical need for millions of patients and families, but remains only a dream in many parts of the world. The failure to do a strategic planning process is one obstacle to advancing education and pain prevention and relief. The Middle Eastern Cancer Consortium Steering Committee attendees completed an initial strategic planning process and identified "developmental steps" to advance palliative care. Underscoring the multi-disciplinary nature of comprehensive palliative care, discipline-specific planning was done (adult and pediatric cancer and medicine, pharmacy, nursing) in a separate process from country-specific planning. Delineating the layers of intersection and differences between disciplines and countries was very powerful. Finding the common strengths and weaknesses in the status quo creates the potential for a more powerful regional response to the palliative care needs. Implementing and refining these preliminary strategic plans will augment and align the efforts to advance palliative care education and pain management in the Middle East. The dream to prevent and relieve suffering for millions of patients with advanced disease will become reality with a powerful strategic planning process well implemented.
1. Recognize the challenges palliative care providers face in their practice. 2. Identify an accessible resource for expert assistance on palliative care issues.Background. Community physicians are often ill-prepared for the management of complex symptoms. With a shortage of board certified physicians in palliative medicine, there is a lack of access to critical pain and symptom management expertise to care for seriously ill patients.Research Objectives. Provide a palliative care telephone hotline resource for healthcare professionals.Method. San Diego Hospice and The Institute for Palliative Medicine received a grant from United Healthcare to provide a telephone hotline for professionals to assist in answering clinical questions relating to palliative care. An extensive marketing campaign was initiated to publicize the service. Information from the calls was collected over a 2½ year period. The data included referral source, geographic area, diagnosis, and reason for call. Satisfaction surveys were sent following calls.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.