Traveling Scholars Program Report
Mateo Gomez, DR
Travel date: September 8, 2020
Name of Meeting/Event/Activity: UT MD Anderson Cancer Center (MDACC) Updates in Hospice and Palliative Medicine and Intensive Physician Board Review Course
Origin: Bogota, Colombia / Destination: Houston, Texas, USA
How was this meeting/activity helpful to you?
This was a huge update in the palliative care field. Importantly, it gave me current knowledge that will help my practice, my team and the palliative care association I´m working with right now.
How will you new knowledge & acquired skills help in furthering your work in hospice and palliative care in your program/city/ or country?
My plan is sharing some of the information that I´ve learned with my team, and I´m goint to be more aware of certains issues that I used to dismissed. We got a good team but as always I think there`s a lot room for improvement. I think I will concentrate into improving communication skills between the team and the patients but also among the team members, I will also work to implement some guidelines regarding this issues discussed in the course. Nation wise the activity didn`t give much skills to improve the policies in my country, but through more education to the healthcare directors and the general public I think we`ll be able to force some good changes in the medium and long term.
How IAHPC Traveling Scholars Program be improved in order to help other future traveling scholars?
I think the scholarship was great, and it covered all the needs for this particular activity, moreover the IAHPC helped during the whole process kindly and swiftly.
Narrative summary highlighting the needs and challanges you face
In my Country, palliative care is new to a lot people, specially practitioners and people outside the main capitals. So I think the more knowledge we have and the more communications skills we learned, will help us to show the multiples benefits from palliative care in a lot of areas.For example medicine schools are being more aware of the importance of palliative care and create some course about. So we will have new physicians interested in the field. And the more we are, the more we can generate changes in institutional and eventually national policies.