Travel date: May 18, 2017
Name of Meeting/Event/Activity: 15th European Association Palliative Care Conference
Origin: Medellin, Colombia / Destination: Madrid, Spain
Having the opportunity to share with people of other countries helped me see the development of the palliative care in the world, and to see how it is implemented all around the world trying to fulfill the goal of a world that’s able to help every patient from a more human perspective.
The new knowledge and skills will help me to extend the vision and perspectives of palliative care on my work place, spreading out the new knowledge and making the palliative care better.
IAHPC Traveling Scholarship is a great opportunity for people of developing countries to improve their knowledge and point of view of palliative care, so this scholarship in my opinion should be focusing on these countries to be able to grow the palliative care quality of those places. Besides that, this scholarship is perfect and a wonderful opportunity for share knowledge about palliative care all around the world.
Palliative care in Colombia has had a slow development and as in most of the countries of the World was born linked to Oncology units only. In our country, we have several limitations, among them the lack of availability of opioids in areas other than large cities. We are also limited with non-oncological palliative care that is only now beginning to emerge in our country. We do not have specialized people to perform pediatric palliative care, and this is how people trained in adult palliative care attend the children of our country. It is understood that these areas must be strengthened and that education is a fundamental pillar to achieve this. In the congress I had the opportunity to see how in other countries the non-oncological palliative care has been developed, especially in areas such as cardiology, neurology and pneumology. It was very important to see the heart failure conference and everything that can be done with these patients, as well as about anticoagulation. Likewise, it was nice to share with people dedicated exclusively to pediatric palliative care and to discover that pediatricians should perform it. There remains an arduous task in our country to involve more pediatricians in this area. We must continue working on clear policies Taking advantage of the fact that we have the palliative care law in the country.