Travel date: April 14, 2016
Name of Meeting/Event/Activity: VIII Latin American Congress on Palliative Care
Origin: Santiago, Chile / Destination: Mexico City, Mexico
This activity was useful to know the reality of palliative care in other countries. In addition, it helped me to establish contacts with other professionals for future interdisciplinary work
I am currently working in programming and designing a hospice program post graduate in college where I work. The knowledge acquired in the course of pre-conference on education, gave me ideas and guidelines for this work. I reinforced that interdisciplinarity is essential to work in palliative care. I reinforced the relevance of make a proper assessment and intervention of the spiritual needs of the sick person and family.
I think this scholarship is very well organized and directed. My only suggestion is that the criterion that no favors developed countries, by income per capita, is confusing and I think that professionals could limit developing country like Chile can apply. In my case, I thought that, as Chile did not meet criteria to apply. After consulting with a representative of the IAHPC, I dared to send my application. Another important aspect is that it should open the possibility of applying for nursing technicians (not university graduates). These health team members tend to be in direct contact with patient care and I think they would have much to contribute.
Being able to visualize how developed palliative care in Latin American countries made me see that in my country, Chile, we have made great strides, which makes me feel proud and motivates me to keep on contributing in this discipline, for my country. Moreover, I could confirm the challenge we have in Chile, to expand the coverage of palliative care to people who have oncological diseases. While it is an honor that in Chile we have the government support to caring for people with terminal cancer and we have money to supply drugs to manage symptoms, especially opioids, yet we can extend this coverage to people who are died of other chronic and / or catastrophic illnesses and also require support and guidance of a specialist in the \"end of life\" equipment. Another confirmed in some plenary sessions, courses and pousters, necessity is the deficit of professional education in palliative care. In Chile, we have few specialists trained in continuing education programs or graduate and universities have few programs. My personal project is focused on designing educational graduate programs, however, one of my main lessons of the conference was that we must continue to fight to incorporate this discipline in medical education / nurse at the undergraduate level, so as to \"love\" the student training since its inception and thus generate professionals who have had reflective experiences about their own sense of life / death / suffering, and have some minimum competencies to meet people who are going to die, at any stage of health you touch them to work . Also, confirm the need to extend the analytical and reflective education, to other disciplines such as physical therapists (physiotherapists), psychologists, nursing technicians, psychologists and volunteers because, as stated in one of the talks, work team must be focused on interdisciplinarity, ie, different disciplines, constant communication, working for the quality of life of the terminally ill.