Mastodon Hospice and Palliative Medicine Journal Club on Twitter - #hpmJC ~ Pallimed

Sunday, November 16, 2014

Hospice and Palliative Medicine Journal Club on Twitter - #hpmJC

It started with a Tweet. Back in October 2013, my Twitter friend and palliative care colleague Becky Baines tweeted from the Help the Hospices conference in the UK:

I am happy to report: there were.

Four months and several emails and tweets later, #hpmJC was born on the 25th February 2014. For our first journal club, we chose this BMJ paper1 on the safety of opioids and benzodiazepines in advanced COPD. Over thirty global participants (including palliative care and respiratory medicine specialists, research scientists, and data experts) from at least 3 continents contributed to the debate at #hpmJC, posting more than 200 tweets over the course of an hour.

As the chair of the inaugural #hpmJC, I was amazed by the enthusiasm, the depth of discussion, and the unexpected tangents that led from the main discussion. It was exhausting trying to keep track of all the threads but incredibly fun and rewarding.

We want #hpmJC to be of interest to #hpm practitioners and researcher globally. Therefore we will have a ‘pass the baton’ format for the chair and we are excited by the thought that the baton will be passed far and wide, with the times of #hpmJC varying accordingly. We only suggest that the paper discussed should be open access, and ideally it should be applicable not just to specialists in palliative care, but have messages for generalists delivering end of life care too.

All of the articles we have discussed so far as listed below.  Some higlights from past #hpmJC include: the Palliative Medicine paper2 on the imminence of death amongst hospital inpatients. The study, carried out in 25 Scottish Hospitals, showed that almost 30% of hospital inpatients died during the subsequent year, and highlighted the need for end of life care in the acute hospital setting to be ‘everybody’s business’. The paper generated a huge amount of media interest, and we are thrilled that the first author of the paper, Prof David Clark (@dumfriesshire), joined us for the journal club. He has also written a blog about the paper here3. So, you never know if you join us to hear more about important research, you may get the rare opportunity to question the author directly.

Hope to see you at #hpmJC! The next one is scheduled for Nov 17th 7am NYC, 12n London, 11pm SYD on Identifying changes in the support networks of end-of-life carers using social network analysis!

Katherine Sleeman, BSc, MBBS, MRCP, PhD
Clinician and academic in palliative medicine, Cicely Saunders Institute, King’s College London





1 http://www.bmj.com/content/348/bmj.g445.pdf%2Bhtml
2 http://pmj.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/03/17/0269216314526443.full.pdf+html
3 http://endoflifestudies.academicblogs.co.uk/how-many-people-in-hospital-today-will-die-within-a-year/

#hpmJC Events so far:

25th Feb led by Katherine Sleeman 
Safety of benzodiazepines and opioids in very severe respiratory disease: national prospective study http://www.bmj.com/content/348/bmj.g445

17th March led by Catherine Walshe 
Associations between palliative chemotherapy and adult cancer patients’ end of life care and place of death: prospective cohort study http://www.bmj.com/content/348/bmj.g1219.full.pdf+html

4th April led by Sarah Russell  (paper was made open access by Pallaitive Medicine for the journal club, and lead author @dumfriesshire joined in too )
Imminence of death among hospital inpatients: Prevalent cohort study http://pmj.sagepub.com/content/28/6/474.long

5th May led by Elissa Campbell
Interventions to encourage discussion of end-of-life preferences between members of the general population and the people closest to them - a systematic literature review http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-684X/12/40

9th June led by Catherine Walshe 
Patients’, family caregivers’, and professionals’ perspectives on quality of palliative care: A qualitative study http://m.pmj.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/05/09/0269216314532154.abstract

29th September led by Ollie Minton  (Pallimed post by Ollie Minton on this Journal Club)
Diagnosing dying: an integrative literature review http://spcare.bmj.com/content/4/3/263.full.pdf

17th November led by Libby Sallnow  and Publich Health and Palliative Care Intl   - Facebook Event Reminder
Identifying changes in the support networks of end-of-life carers using social network analysis http://m.spcare.bmj.com/content/early/2013/11/19/bmjspcare-2012-000257.full?g=w_spcare_open_tab&fb_source=message

Image Credit: Animal Stock Photo

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