Travel date: May 18, 2017
Name of Meeting/Event/Activity: 15th European Association Palliative Care Conference
Origin: San Martin Hidalgo, Mexico / Destination: Madrid, Spain
Being able to be in an international event has made it possible for me to know proposals for management, attention, and research in different contexts and the ways to solve the situations that arise. Establish links with professionals of different places that allow to continue learning. Innovative ideas, forms of organization and intervention strategies, but above all the contagion of the passion for compassionate medicine, for care, for the person.
The knowledge and skills acquired at this Congress will help me continue to drive the Palliative Care unit of the hospital where I worked. This unit has an incipient work in the integration of a team. It has not been an easy task, since multiple sweeps of an organizational and human nature have prevented it. Especially in a moment of internal crisis of the team in which they think about the possibility of giving up, the fact of seeing the passion and delivery of professionals from all over the world allows to relativize and to dimension in a more positive way the problems. I believe that this opportunity is unique to boost the work of palliative care in the hospital and get deeply involved.
I am deeply grateful to IAHCP for the scholarship, Dr. Lima, Genevieve and others who have helped this possibility. In fact, those who continue with this school scholarship strategy will allow many people to know and share knowledge and experiences due to the situations in the contexts of our regions. Keep up your generous work.
In Mexico, palliative care is offered in isolation in third-level urban centers. However, many people do not yet have effective access to pain control and other symptoms. There is a legal framework that speaks of the obligatoriness in the attention of the patients, however, a gap exists to be able to reach the attention for all. At the local level, the hospital in which I work had no palliative care unit and has worked to be able to offer the right beneficiaries this approach. It seeks to impact on care, training, and research at different levels of the Institute and collaborate to achieve common goals.