Two Advisory Boards of 24 expert physicians in ethics, hospice, and palliative care initially recommended the curricular content and format. It was not intended to define or describe the specialty skills of a palliative medicine physician. It sets out the core competencies that all physicians should have in palliative care. The project aims to improve end-of-life care through a ripple effect as the trainers educate a growing number of physicians.Ī key tool of the EPEC Project was the development of the EPEC Curriculum. The central hypothesis is that a core curriculum designed, written and taught by physicians using state of the art clinical knowledge and education theory, can be effective in reaching a second tier of physicians by having the newly trained physicians return to their work settings and seek to engage and educate a growing number of their peers using and adapting the provided educational materials. The overall method is to use a "train-the-trainer" dissemination model.
#SYLAPS SCOPOLAMINE HOW TO#
The overall goal of the EPEC Project is to teach physicians how to provide better care to terminally ill patients. To increase physician knowledge of new developments in palliation and their level of clinical competence in end-of-life care, the Institute for Ethics at the American Medical Association, with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, embarked on the Education for Physicians on End-of-life Care (EPEC) Project. While we hope each pearl can improve a physician's practice, the complete Education for Physicians on End-of-life Care (EPEC) Curriculum should be mastered in order to be fully effective.
To be effective in end-of-life care, physicians must also have a broad conceptualization of end-of-life care and the legal issues that support it and they must be competent in communication, decision-making and relation-building skills. However, to focus on symptom control skills alone will miss the mark. After an overview of the approaches to whole patient assessment, we summarize the management of several of the more common symptoms that occur at the end-of-life. This is not a fringe activity, but a core competency for physicians. While some practitioners will have specialist palliative care services upon which to call, most in the world will need to provide the initial approaches to symptom control at the end-of-life. The monograph does not purport to summarize specialist knowledge.
Many of the approaches will apply much earlier in the course of the illness, not just at the end of life. This monograph aims to summarize the core competencies in symptom control needed by any physician, no matter his or her specialty. While some physicians will have specialist palliative care services upon which to call, most in the world will need to provide the initial approaches to symptom control at the end-of-life.Ī wide range of symptoms produce considerable suffering in patients at the end of their lives. Approaches to the medical management of pain, depression, anxiety, breathlessness (dyspnea), nausea/vomiting, constipation, fatigue/weakness and the symptoms common during the last hours of life are described. Whole patient assessment forms the basis for good symptom control. Content development was guided by the goal of teaching core competencies not included in the training of generalist and non-palliative medicine specialist physicians. The content was developed through a combination of expert opinion, participant feedback and selected literature review. The EPEC Curriculum was developed to be a comprehensive syllabus including trainer notes, multiple approaches to teaching the material, slides, and videos of clinical encounters to trigger discussion are provided.
It is not intended to transmit specialty level competencies in palliative care. The Education for Physicians in End-of-life Care (EPEC) Project is an ambitious program to increase core palliative care skills for all physicians. Palliative medicine is assuming an increasingly important role in patient care.
0 kommentar(er)
