Travel date: April 14, 2016
Name of Meeting/Event/Activity: VIII Congress of the Latin American Association for Palliative Care
Origin: LaPlata, Argentina / Destination: Mexico City, Mexico
It has been for me a wonderful opportunity to learn about the activities of Palliative Care in Latin America, sharing experiences to rethink the daily work I do in my work environment. I left the Congress wanting to research, innovate and continue working in this specialty I chose 8 years. As well as the happiness of finding professionals with extensive technical and human quality.
I served much the tables leadership, planning and implementation of strategies that improve population coverage, create networks of care complexity and evaluate the cost effectiveness of services as a way to manage well the financial resources and as a means of persuasion to funders health programs.
In the province of Buenos Aires, Argentina we have a health system divided into three sectors: public, private and social works. The institution I represent is the social work of public employees in the province and has 2 million members (MAOIs). Three years ago we have a Palliative Care Program initially began as a home care system formed by an interdisciplinary team of doctors and psychologists trained in palliative care, nurses, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, caregivers and social workers. oxygen therapy, orthotics and provision of opioids and other medications for symptomatic control, all free and with services beginning at 24 hours of your application is also provided. While to three years are good indicators of activity, the challenge of our program is currently expanding the conditional population coverage mainly by the relative scarcity of qualified human resources and to offer our patients a wide range of palliative care services in different levels of care. In the congress activities I found ideas and tools to carry out this new phase of our program basically start working on a study of cost effectiveness of palliative care in order to offer to funders more than important for the implementation of the objectives stimulus expansion before described. I hope in the next Latin American Congress can show the results.