Traveling Scholars Program Report
Rebeca Marielos Salandra Canas
Travel date: April 11, 2018
Name of Meeting/Event/Activity: IX Congreso Latinoamericano de Cuidados Paliativos de la Asociación Latinoamericana de Cuidados Paliativos (ALCP)
Origin: San Salvador, El Salvador / Destination: Santiago, Chile
Photos
Rebeca Marielos Salandra Canas poster presentation at the congress How was this meeting/activity helpful to you?
This was an enrich experience. I had the opportunity to learn more about the psychological aspects on palliative care. Specially, about this ¨trendy¨ psychological perspective called ¨positive psychology¨. All of the workshops I assisted provide me with tools I can implement here at my work place. This experience helped me realize that I am on the right track. Listening how others work, helped me understand that I am providing the psychological service as it should be. With this I don’t mean that I know everything but at least with the lack of resources I have, I am doing it the best I can. That made me feel comfortable and happy, encouraging me to keep working hard and researching to acquire more knowledge and become a better psychologist.
How will you new knowledge & acquired skills help in furthering your work in hospice and palliative care in your program/city/ or country?
In El Salvador we are trying to build a stronger palliative care community. The conference provided examples on how these communities were built in other third world country. I had the opportunity to speak with the doctor in charge on building these communities and he explained that even though we had a lot of barriers we could start on our palliative care hospital. One of the main things is to begin palliative care trainings in order to increase the professionals involved with this we could get to other cities. In the other hand, the workshops provide me practical techniques and evaluation tools that I started using with my patients at the palliative care hospital. I already propose to the professional team at the hospital to implement the spiritual evaluation as part of the daily symptoms. Hopefully it would be taken into consideration. The techniques provided are new ways to use with the patients in order to provide them a new perspective and help them use other personal resources to go through the illness.
How IAHPC Traveling Scholars Program be improved in order to help other future traveling scholars?
I am really pleased with the opportunity the IAHPC just provide me and the only thing I could recommend is more advertising because there are many people around the world that need the help but they are not aware that the IAHPC exist.
Narrative summary highlighting the needs and challanges you face
The palliative care service in El Salvador is barely starting to flourish even though we have a hospital which provides this service we are still short on knowledge. In this country we don’t have a place that train professionals from different areas on palliative care service which limits the amount of people involved because more than the 50 % of the country those not know or do not understand this type of service. Due to the knowledge acquire at the meeting we could start by raising awareness on the professional of different areas as well of raising awareness on patients. Listening on how other countries such as Colombia are starting to implement ¨comunidades compasivas¨ gave me hope that if we join with new health foundation and work on awareness we could start spreading the palliative care service, so I am totally convince that PALLATIVE CARE IS AND COULD BE FOR EVERYONE.