Achieving patients’ and families’ goals for pain and symptom control is challenging at all stages of life, particularly for patients with multiple chronic illnesses, overall declining health status, and limited options for alternative approaches. Implementing palliative care approaches can significantly improve your ability to care for these patients and reduce the stresses on you and your staff.
Ruth Medak MD, FACP is Hospice and Palliative Care Medical Director for Providence Health & Services Oregon Region. The Providence mission of “know me, care for me ease my way” perfectly reflects the work of hospice and palliative care. The hard work is in ensuring that patients and families understand their medical condition and treatment options, have the opportunity to formulate goals, and receive treatment that matches their goals. Under Dr. Medak’s leadership Providence is embarking on innovative programs to achieve that vision through promoting development of palliative care skills among providers and staff and implementation of palliative care in outpatient clinical practices. She brings to her role extensive experience as a primary care provider and leadership of clinical care quality improvement and measurement initiatives.
Learning Objectives:
Participants will be able to:
• Describe two or more causes for resistant pain.
• Explain differences in appropriate pain and symptom management at end-of-life.
• Describe one or more additional palliative care strategies that facilitate pain and symptom management at end-of-life.
Target Audience:
Physicians
PAs and other clinicians
Instructions for participants:
The entire webinar must be completed and an evaluation completed before a certificate of completion will be awarded.
Disclosures:
Each faculty, staff and planning committee member has disclosed that they have no relevant financial relationships to disclose. No commercial support was accepted for this activity.
Oregon Medical Association is accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education to provide continuing medical education for physicians.
Oregon Medical Association designates this Enduring activity for a maximum of 1.0 AMA PRA Category 1 credits™. Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.