Each month, we publish a selection of items that may be of interest to our global readership. Contributions are welcomed; we reserve the right to edit content.
Please also consider promoting your education and training events in the IAHPC Global Directory of Education in Palliative Care. It’s quick and easy — just submit your content online.
Photos and bios of IAHPC’s new Board of Directors is now online.
The board now comprises three lifetime members (Derek Doyle, William Farr, and Roger Woodruff), six continuing members (Lukas Radbruch, Liliana De Lima, Mary Callaway, Julia Downing, Chitra Vankatswaran, and Roberto Wenk), and nine new members (Ebtesam [Sammi] Ahmed, Claudia Burlá, Nahla Gafer, Harmala Gupta, Gulnara Kunirova, Eve Namisango, Hibah Osman, Steven Radwany, and Dingle Spence).
The board represents 11 countries: Argentina, Brazil, Egypt, Germany, Jamaica, India, Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Sudan, Uganda, and the USA.
The U.S.-based Centre to Advance Palliative Care offers a free course for non-members titled, Supporting the Caregivers of People Living with Dementia. The course teaches evidence-based best practices and strategies for assessing caregiver burden and connecting caregivers to support systems.
The course does the following:
The CAPC course aims to ‘support the vital role that caregivers play, and aid clinicians in learning how to best support them.’ There are more than 16 million family and other unpaid caregivers of people living with dementia in the United States, according to the CAPC.
Start the free course here. This course joins a related one that is also open to the public: An In-Depth Look at Palliative Care and Its Services.
‘Busting the Myths of Hospice Palliative Care’ is a thrust of Canada’s Hospice Palliative Care Week, taking place 5-11 May 2019. For this year’s campaign, the Canadian Hospice Palliative Care Association (CHPCA) has created both a downloadable English poster and French poster that debunk 10 popular myths about hospice palliative care.
National Hospice Palliative Care Week celebrates palliative care, but also provides a platform to look at shortcomings and create bridges for these gaps. The CHPCA poster responded to a call for an updated ‘Busting the Myths’ campaign. Myths circulate about accessibility, ease of access, illness criteria and cultural misperceptions of hospice palliative care and impacts care that is accessed and provided.
To continue the conversation online, social media users are invited to test (or debunk!) their knowledge by engaging with CHPCA’s Facebook and Twitter questions throughout the week. #BustingtheMyths on Twitter is also an invitation for people to share palliative care myths they have encountered.
Butterfly Children’s Hospices, a well-established NGO, is seeking to fill the position of Chief Executive Officer. Its stated mission is to further promote excellence in children’s palliative and hospice care in China (and other similar locations) through leadership, local collaboration, advocacy and education.
The position requires a person fluently bilingual in Mandarin and English, ‘a dynamic and creative leader, with the drive to lead and further develop our dedicated team.’ The role requires high-level consultation with the Chinese government and medical authorities, collaboration and relationship building skills, with philanthropic, corporate, government and community stakeholders both within China and internationally.
Initially, the successful candidate will also be responsible for operational oversight of existing management in the Butterfly Home in Hunan Province, Changsha. To find out more information about the posting, or to submit your CV, contact Lyn Gould at [email protected].
Are you a health care administrator, physician, nurse practitioner, administrative assistant, counsellor, nurse, care coordinator, or clinical team leader and are seeking other employment in the field of palliative care? Check the Centre to Advance Palliative Care’s job postings.
The deadline to apply for the European Palliative Care Academy Leadership Course, announced in the January IAHPC newsletter, is 9 June 2019. The course is structured to help develop theoretical knowledge and skills in the fields of personal and project development, teamwork, research, and advocacy.
It begins in September and spans four weeks over three years (2019-2021); each week takes place in a different country (Germany, the UK, Poland, Romania). To apply or for more information, visit www.eupca.eu.
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Dr. Farzana Khan, Dhaka, Bangladesh
Do you have a resource that could help others? Send it to the editor: [email protected]
A consensus white paper on ‘The Safe and Appropriate Use of Methadone in Hospice and Palliative Care’ written by experts in the field was published in the March issue of the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management.
The article includes guidance on appropriate candidates for methadone, details on dosing, titration, and monitoring of patients' response to methadone therapy.
The list of potentially appropriate candidates includes those with:
The list of potentially inappropriate candidates includes those who:
Download a PDF of the article here.
Last year, the World Health Organization updated its previous guidelines on management of cancer pain issued in 1996. The 2018 ‘Guidelines for the pharmacologic and radiotherapeutic management of cancer pain in adults and adolescents’ provide evidence-based guidance to initiating and managing cancer pain.
The aim of the guidelines is to provide guidance to health-care providers (i.e. the end-users of these guidelines: physicians, nurses, pharmacists and caregivers) on the adequate relief of pain associated with cancer. The guidelines also assist policy-makers, program managers and public health personnel to create and facilitate appropriately balanced policies on opioids and prescribing regulations for effective and safe cancer pain management.
The clinical guidelines and recommendations are organized into three focal areas:
The document is freely available as a PDF here.
The World Health Organization has an infographic, suitable for posting, in several languages. ‘Improving Access to Palliative Care’ is available in Arabic, Chinese Farsi French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish as well as English.
The infographic addresses the questions:
You can download it from the WHO website here.
Find the workshop, seminar, congress, or conference that speaks to you in the IAHPC Calendar of Events, updated monthly, that lists activities of special interest to those who work in palliative care. Or submit an event for consideration; it’s free!
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