Whenever peers in your field are recognized for their hard work and dedication it is really reason for us all to celebrate the growth and increasing attention for the hospice and palliative care fields. Of course one would expect one's own representative organizations like HPNA, NHPCO, CAPC, and AAHPM to participate in celebrations of achievement, but it is even more important when groups outside our own tribe begin to share in the accolades.
The Cambia Health Foundation is holding the
2012 Sojourns Awards today in Seattle, WA to recognize five clinicians holding the flag for quality of life and symptom control for those with serious illness. The Sojourns Award was created in 2007 to recognize palliative care regional leaders in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Utah. As luck would have it I was already planning to be in Seattle today, and the Cambia Health Foundation invited me to the Awards ceremony to meet the award recipients. Also attending the ceremony is the journalist Ellen Goodman, who has recently co-founded
The Conversation Project, which encourages people to talk about their end-of-life care wishes. She will be giving the keynote, presumably about her new project, which I also plan on featuring here soon.
I'm hoping to be able to interview all of the awardees and tell you more about their projects and the particular challenges and rewards they have encountered. You can read more about each of their work with the links below if you are curious.
- Darrell Owens, D.N.P., A.R.N.P., Seattle, Washington
- John Forsyth, M.D., Medford, Oregon
- Kathy Perko, M.S., Portland, Oregon
- Carolyn Nystrom, R.N., Ketchum, Idaho
- Patricia Berry, Ph.D., R.N., Salt Lake City, Utah
For more live coverage you can follow me on Twitter at @ctsinclair or the hashtag #SojournsAwards. I believe Eric Widera from GeriPal will also be at the conference so they might have some coverage as well. I'll be testing out some audio recordings as well for possible future podcasting. I'll let you know how that experiment goes as well.
(Disclaimer: The Cambia Health Foundation will be covering one night hotel stay as part of the invitation to blog and tweet about the event)
