AAHPM Pre-Conference Preview - Part II (HPNA Sessions)

The American Academy of Hospice & Palliative Medicine and the Hospice and Palliative Nurses Association Annual Assembly is coming up next week. I started doing the preview because one of my favorite things about conferences is talking to other people to see what they are interested in, so feel free to tell us what you are going to and why. If you are giving any of these talks, I encourage you to leave some comments to get more people aware of your talk. I am not as familiar with some of the HPNA speakers and their experience so please feel free to leave comments.

Previous entries:
Preview of AAHPM Pre-Conferences - Part I

Train the Trainer sessions are an essential part of spreading information in a consistent manner. they usually follow a script to some degree as a means to ensure the consistency. Usually they are taught by a few experts in the field. Nancy Grandovic is the director of education for the HPNA, so that is a pretty good qualification. While the course is $200, you do get quite a few resources for the price. Might be a good resource for getting more certified Hospice & palliative Care RN's.

8a-Noon

As anyone who has started to work through billing issues with advanced practice nurses knows there is a lot of variation from state to state, and things that seem clear end up being pretty cloudy. For anyone who has an advanced practice nurse working in your hospice or palliative care program, this one is a must to make sure that you are optimizing a great resource. Tom, any comments on how nurses can make the acronyms less confusing or what the origins for all the different levels are? (APRN, APN, APNP, CNS, etc, etc.)



Covering an important area in hospice care, Betty Morgan delves into PTSD, substance abuse, and other complex psychiatic co-morbities as they relate to patients and families. From the abstract it sounds like it will cover more then just depression and anxiety for sure.


While not an area that many small palliative care programs and hospices may be able to enter, this is a subject that has not been covered much in recent conferences. I am glad to see policy programs such as this. One interesting thing that came up in a recent discussion of future avenues for expanding hospice programs was for individual programs to collaborate for local and regional legislative initiatives. Given some of the very competitive markets for hospice this would be a nice area to see some collaboration.

1-5p


This session would be very helpful for nurses in the field since they act as eyes and ears fro all things clinical in programs that do not have the luxury of physicians that make home visits. Even when you do have more active physician involvement in the home, the level of nurse-MD collaboration seems to increase necessitating better H&P skills for the nurse.


For most palliative care practitioners, family dynamics are really on-the-job training. Having a MSW (Stellrecht) as part of this session may be an important piece to setting up a systematic way to address family conflicts. Interestingly it is listed as a workshop but there is no mention of role-play, maybe because that usually scares people away because of fear of participation?


This description of this session starts out by describing pacemakers and defibrillators, but the rest goes on to only address ICD's and the withholding of ICD therapy when near the end-of-life. I have noticed the general opposition to ICD reprogramming at EOL has been much less recently, but the issue of whether or not to withdraw/withhold pacemaker therapy seems to be more controversial in the cardiac field. I hope they go into more discussion about pacemakers as well since they have 4 hours.

Look for the rest of the conference this week. There are a lot of sessions so expect a few posts.

Photo by Flickr.com user Damgaard