Traveling Scholars Program Report
Eva Paoletti, Nurse
Travel date: May 16, 2024
Name of Meeting/Event/Activity: European Association For Palliative Care Research Congress
Origin: Carignano, Italy / Destination: Barcelona, Spain
How was this meeting/activity helpful to you?
Topic ideas: The role of healthcare providers and people with the request of assisted suicide. Palliative care and AI. Causes and factors that impact structurally fragile populations’ access to community resources to support their needs of palliative care.
This event was a good opportunity to create a network for future collaborations
What were the three main takeaways from this conference/event
- A good research has an appropriate design, data collection and analyses. The narrative is clear, there is a purpose, it has straightforward, relevant messages and related conclusions. It’s important to have clear What is our key message. Keep it simple. Don’t give up if the journal rejects you. It doesn’t mean the value of your paper.
- Spiritual care is not only related to the question “are you religious?” if the answer is “no” there aren’t spiritual needs and if the answer is “yes” we call the priest. It doesn’t work in this way. We can do way more. When we assess spiritual needs we are already providing spiritual care. We have to prepare for death, from the child to the training of health care providers. At an assessment level everyone can do SC, to a higher level we need specialized professions.
- An Austrin report showed that the major reason why people are asking assisted suicide is due to symptom control issues, existential suffering and physical symptoms ( primarily pain) were the most common. This showed the importance of improving assisted living.
Did you attend a session or workshop on advocacy? If yes, how do plan to build or improve collaborative relationships with your current government officials?
I attended two speeches about advocacy that I found very inspiring.
One was from Xavier Gomez-Batiste (Spain) that received the Cicely Saunders Award and Presented a Lecture: Developing palliative care towards universal coverage. Psychosocial and spiritual care as human rights of persons with advanced chronic conditions. He created and developed the origin of the Catalonia WHO palliative care project, the first public health program in the world, which saw the development of a wide range of palliative care services linked to geriatrics and chronic care.
The second talk was by Sabrina Bajwah who won the Research Award Clinic Impact. Her speech was very touching and inspiring, she talked about a dramatic event in her life and how this event pushed her even more to research and implement policy on racial inequality in palliative care. During COVID time she also developed information fact sheets for patients and careers, it has been translated in 25 countries.
Did you attend any sessions or workshops on research in palliative care? If so, describe ways you will enact what you learned in your research projects
A Large number of workshops were focused on research. I learned that it is important to involve a mentor early. Editing is very much an effort. It’s important to be careful about the clue of the journal. Stay in the domain of your paper. Months on revision. Please be patient with editors or reviewers, it takes months, respond to every suggestion from reviewers. We are writing for the world, enhancing engagement and connection with an international audience. Write for the audience.