| Thursday, July 12, 2007: 8:00 AM-9:30 AM | |||
| Palliative Care in the Intensive Care Setting | |||
| Learning Objective #1: The learner will be able to understand the need for palliative care in the intensive care setting. | |||
| Learning Objective #2: The learner will be able to describe how to initiate a palliative care team. | |||
| More than one million people die each week around the world and 56 million die each year. It is estimated that 60% of these could benefit from some form of palliative end of life care. However, only a small group of dying people ever receive the support of hospice or end of life care and unrelieved suffering persists on a large scale. Unfortunately, palliative end of life care is greatly underdeveloped in most poor countries, and it is still significantly constrained even in many counties that have advance healthcare systems (Clark & Wright, 2004). In the developed world, life expectancy continues to rise. This trend demonstrates the decrease of the dominant cause of death from infectious diseases, to diseases of longer duration such as acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), tuberculosis (TB), and cancer. Developing countries have two thirds of the global disease of burden, but only 5% of the world’s resources, such as doctors, nurses, medications, equipment, and funds (Clark & Wright, 2003). In many African countries, over half of the population will never encounter a doctor or nurse in their lifetime (World Health Organization [WHO], 2005). Therefore, it is the challenge and responsibility of healthcare leaders to create a trained multi-disciplinary workforce to deliver clinical care, educational programs to support them, and an evidence base to highlight both unmet need and the efficacy of existing provision of care. In order to improve end of life care for all who need it, now more than ever, it is time to be thinking globally, as well as acting locally (Clark & Wright, 2004). | |||
| Organizer: | Mary Wyckoff, PhD, APRN, BC, CCNS, CCRN | ||
| Palliative Care Teams Salma Hernandez, MSN, ARNP, BC | |||
| Palliative Care Concepts: a Global Perspective Mary Wyckoff, PhD, APRN, BC, CCNS, CCRN | |||
| Cultural influences on end of life decisions Douglas Houghton, MSN, ARNP, CCRN | |||