Hospice and Palliative Medicine Oriented Blogs

For Pallimed readers who have not ventured out to other blogs, there are some wonderful sites you may want to visit to broaden your knowledge of the palliative medicine field.

The Hospice Foundation of America sponsors the Hospice and Caregiving Blog, which is edited by Krista Renenger. The blog offers short posts highlighting hospice stories in the media, recent political issues relevant to hospice agencies, and caregiver stories. Some recent recommended posts include:

• The summary post of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) June 2008 Report to Congress on hospice growth.
• A post about state laws and implementing POLST (physician orders for life-sustaining treatment)

The blog does not currently have email subscriptions but RSS feeds are available. If you browse the internet and blogs frequently and you don't know what a RSS feed does, then check out the quick video (scroll down a bit) on our FAQ page.

The other blog that we occasionally link to is the Hospice Blog written by Hospice Guy. He scaled back his posting frequency for a few months but I am glad he is back to writing a little more often. As an administrator for a hospice, his posts focus more on the practical issues of running a hospice agency and how that may impact patient care. His blog is most well known for the 'How to Choose a Hospice' series first started in 2005 and now being updated for 2008. If you type in 'choose hospice or 'pick hospice' his posts get pretty high in the search engine, so if you work for a hospice, you may want to see what he writes, since your potential future patients/families may be using his criteria. Here are the topics for the series 'How to Choose a Hospice':

• Why it matters
• Why ownership matters
• Why management matters
• Why location matters
• Why pharmacies matter
• Why size matters
• Why staffing matters (not updated yet)
• Why recomendations matter (not updated yet)
  
• Why some things don't matter (not updated yet)
  

I am hoping that he writes one on "Why Having a (Board Certified & hopefully full-time) Palliative Care Physician matters," but if he does not I have a topic for an upcoming post!

Other posts from Hospice Guy that deserve some attention and maybe a little more commentary from our field are the posts on the Conditions of Participation for Medicare certified Hospice agencies that was just released in May 2008. If anyone has read through the 120+ page document and would like to guest post here (or even at Hospice Blog probably) it would be quite appreciated. Administrative issues are not a favorite topic to write about here at Pallimed. Let us practice medicine!

Dr. Sid Schwab highlights the positive aspects of empathy in preventing burn-out for a surgeon at Surgeonsblog.

Dr. Maurice Bernstein asks how do you want your doctor to be dressed. For palliative care doctors, I think the norm is no white coat, +/- a visible stethoscope. Of course this inevitably leads to the question, "When is the doctor going to be here? You don't look or act like a doctor."

A non-blog site highlighting death & dying as an integral part of life is the online magazine Obit. The site is professionally produced, and has interesting features like Died on the Same Day and Obit Revisited which looks at historical figures and the impact they had in life and death. Slightly morbid if viewed superficially, but with deeper reading the site is very life-affirming.