Eric Widera over at GeriPal posted in April about changes in the National Resident Matching Program (NRMP) timeline for medical subspecialty fellowships, and the implications for Hospice and Palliative Medicine (HPM) and Geriatrics.

I'd like to talk about our Match-less HPM fellowship application process, from one applicant's perspective.

Photography by Ken Goldberg. From “Tele-Twister” CC 2004. Some rights reserved.

Perhaps one might say, "I should be so lucky." My reaction is actually more like panic. The opportunity costs is high assuredly, but determining which I should choose and which I should forego is excruciatingly difficult. I still have 10 applications out (OK maybe too many applications. But, who knows at the outset how one is going to fare?). All of those programs are very interesting to me, for location, institution and program faculty, etc.

So, I ask for and get extensions of the offers. I interview at the program close to my wife's family. When I meet with the program director, I'm told their decision about my cohort of applicants will likely be made after my other offer extensions are up. I also get what is probably a generic invitation to contact the program if I needed an early decision to clarify matters. So, back to the offering programs to update them and ask for more time, which they graciously grant. I then ask for, but did not get, an early decision, which means I was still in the running. So, I am being pulled now in at least three ways, with irons still in the fire.

Interviewing is expensive, especially on a resident's salary, and doing this all during residency, with long hours while taking care of patients and collateral responsibilities, and having to use vacation time is all very stressful. As this is all going on interview offers continue to trickle in. I begin to turn down interview offers, even canceling interviews I already have scheduled, thinking I am likely to take one of these positions. At the same time, I am anxious about eliminating interviews out here in the Wild, Wild West because something could go wrong and my birds in the bush could fly the coop, and the whole thing could come down like a house of cards leaving me in the cold, and empty-handed.

The last few days start ticking down. Out of the blue, I get a contingent offer from a program that is very strong clinically and highly academic, in a culturally vibrant town, not too terribly far away from my family. They are working on getting approval for another Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) slot, versus perhaps another candidate may turn down an offer they have already made. At this point I make criteria for being "drawn and quartered," now being pulled in four different directions. The opportunity costs mount!

Illustrated by Jillian Gilliland © 2009. From “Tell Me A Story” © 2009 Universal Uclick. All rights reserved.

The way it felt, both as it was happening and in retrospect, was something like an uncertain, perilous and epic quest. It reminded me of my favorite epic, The Odyssey. Odysseus was struggling to get home after many long years away, but one problem after another cropped up to thwart him: the whim and malice of gods and goddesses, the threats of monsters, the thrall of enchantments, the lure of comfortable captivities, the sirens' call, tempestuous storms and even more monsters. It is at this point that imagery from the Odyssey wells up: Odysseus caught between the gorging and belching vortex of Charybdis on the one hand and the rapacious heads and voracious mouths of Scylla on the other, with no way out but through.


By luck and craftiness Odysseus barely averts disaster again and again, and by holding to the course, he finally achieves his quest and arrives home, travel-weary, older, perhaps wiser… but also with an unnecessary case of PTSD. To reason that since the hero survives and achieves the quest, the arduous and circuitous course he was made to take is justified is, in my opinion, a rationalization.


In the end, I secured a position and I am very happy with my outcome. I am however very unhappy with the process. Thank goodness for the Electronic Resident Application System (ERAS) where one's application, CV, personal statement, letters of recommendation, are uploaded into the electronic ERAS cloud once, and then are electronically submitted to one's desired programs (except for the programs that don't participate in ERAS and require old-fashioned paper applications, thus duplicating work for interested applicants and their recommenders). Having ERAS in place prevented the process from being even more labor-intensive and chaotic.

The diversity among programs in their respective timelines for application review, interviewing, and how and when to do what about making offers is frankly stunning. My process was cut short by a spoils-to-the-swift ethic. Because of the asynchronous timelines, I had to decline interview offers from programs I was very interested in. Given the inherent power disparity in the roles and the dynamics involved, I did not believe I had the latitude to walk away from offers from great programs in order to "explore my options" further. Perhaps my issue, but I doubt mine alone.

If there wasn't already an existing, simple, validated, large-scale, low-cost system to regulate and standardize behavior and decision-making among applicants and programs then one would be pragmatically stuck with the status quo. Luckily for us the kinks and bugs have already been worked out and a process is readily available for us to plug into. I'm speaking of course of the NRMP, or more simply "the Match."

Having been through an NRMP Match, and now this Matchless Meet Market, I find the latter is wholly unsavory and unsatisfactory. Rather than feeling like I've come through a fair process conducted on an even playing field to arrive at an optimized placement to advance my learning and professional development and to staff the houses of programs with the best they can attract, instead I feel like I just bought a house in today's market; I've closed the best deal I could, but I really would not want to do that over again.

Furthermore, I believe I was extremely lucky; my timelines were generous and fluid. I just think about those souls out there who are waiting for an interview in their preferred program, near their family, but get an acceptance from another program with a one week deadline to accept the offer (not an uncommon demand). Yes, I feel lucky for how it turned out in the end, but I also feel like I've been through the wringer unnecessarily, and I resent that.

My conclusion is that for the sake of learners (and I actually believe in the interests of most programs) HPM needs to align with the leaders in GME and participate in The Match on the same timeline as the other medical specialties. Incidentally, moving the process into applicants' final year of specialty training would bring it in line with the fellowship application process in other specialties, at least with Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation and Emergency Medicine.

If you have a war story, please feel free to add it. I would suggest de-identifying the data for the sake of human subjects protection, if you get my drift.

[Ed. Note: In the vast palliative care social media echo chamber, Eric Widera over at the GeriPal has provided the 2 to a 1-2 post combination on the problems of applicant/learners in the current state-of-the-fellowships. Please be sure to pop on over and check it out. - McMichael

And after you read that, you can see Christian Sinclair's alternate take on the Geripal post. - Sinclair]

The lead research article in the current issue of the American Journal of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation is Inpatient Rehabilitation Improved Functional Status in Asthenic Patients with Solid and Hematologic Malignancies. It was written by a team from the Department of Palliative Care and Rehabilitation Medicine and the Department of Biostatistics at the University of Texas, MD Anderson Cancer Center. This study sought to compare functional outcomes in asthenic patients with hematologic malignancies with those of asthenic patients with solid tumors after inpatient rehabilitation.

In the current issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, under the category, "Health Care Reform" is a Research Letter entitled, Hospital-Based Palliative Medicine Consultation: A Randomized Controlled Trial. It is brought to you by the good folks at UCSF. It was a 2-year, randomized, prospective, clinical trial of patients 65 years or older with heart failure, cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or cirrhosis, who were able to give informed consent, and who spoke English.

In the December 1st issue of Pediatric Blood and Cancer is an article that presents the validation of a prognostic tool in pediatric hospice care. The study was produced by a team from the Hospital A.C. Camargo, a large cancer center in São Paulo, Brazil. Their overall survival rate in the treatment of pediatric cancers is just over 75%, roughly on par with those in the United States at approximately 80%. At this institution, a nurse-led, multidisciplinary palliative care team was developed in 1999. Patients are referred to it when 3 pediatric oncologists reach a consensus that a particular patient has no chance for a cure.

I've grumbled umpteen times that Wikipedia ought get a "Hospice and Palliative Medicine" article written. As it stood when HPM, as a subspecialty, was the intended idea, writers would usually cobble together links to the separate "Hospice" and "Palliative Care" articles. Then I suddenly remembered that we are Wikipedia, and such an article wasn't going to write itself. So I clicked the letters in red of an unwritten article, and wrote one.

Since this is a pretty active Web-2.0 community aligned with the "collaborative, publish first, refine on the go" paradigm, I thought I would turn it over to all y'all to grow it from an initial stub into its full-blossomed elaboration.

So sign in and edit as you see fit, and let's see what we come up with. Also go through the various other, related articles and fine tune the links in the web of Wikipedia knowledge.

Enjoy!

Alex Smith and Eric Widera of GeriPal fame, et al., have just published an article in Annals of Internal Medicine, The Epidemiology of Pain During the Last 2 Years of Life. The L.A. Times article is here. Little is known for certain about the contours of this landscape; so, let's explore.

This was an observational study gleaned from the Health and Retirement Study, a nationally representative survey of community-living adults. The subjects were deceased who, either the subject or proxy, had been interviewed once within the last 24 months of life. The subjects were divided into 24 consecutive cohorts on the basis of the number of months between the interview and death. The prevalence and time-course of clinically significant pain (experienced often and as moderate-to-severe) were described and analyzed with respect to demographic, socioeconomic and clinical factors. These data were modeled and adjusted for the different factors.

I thought I would post on what I hope will turn out to be an occasional series on sexuality here on Pallimed. We've covered sexuality some before. A post that leaps to mind is one by Christian in 2007 about the controversy that arose over a case where the staff at the world's first hospice designed specifically for young adults openly deliberated and decided to facilitate a 22-year-old patient's request to have sex before he died.

• Offered out-of-hospital palliative care: 82%, 75% opted in. Satisfaction rating of very good or excellent for out-of-hospital palliative care: 74%
• 47% received cancer-directed therapy in the last month of life, with 33% experiencing significant side effects. The perceived goal of cancer-directed therapy was 33% palliation, 12% extending life, 12% ensuring everything had been done. Children who received cancer-directed therapy during the end-of-life period suffered from a greater number of symptoms than those who did not receive treatment (p = 0.03).
• 63% had time to plan death location, of these 89% preferred to have the child die at home, and of these all except two died in the planned location; 61% died at home. Of those children who died in-hospital, almost 25% died in an ICU. Life-sustaining treatments were pursued in only 8%.
• Descriptive statistics were presented about symptoms, suffering, treatment and treatment success. It was notable that there was a significant gap between symptom treatment and treatment success. Despite this, 83% reported the death of their child was somewhat or very peaceful.

The 4 Questions:

"During your child's end-of-life care period, did you or a family member ever consider asking someone on the care team to give him/her or give you or the family member medications to intentionally end his/her life?”

"When your child was receiving end-of-life care, did you or a family member ever discuss intentionally ending his/her life?"

"Did you or a family member ask someone on your child's care team to give him/her medications or to give you or the family member medications to intentionally end his/her life?"

"Did a member of your child's care team give your child medications or did you or a family member give him/her medications to intentionally end his/her life?"

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

19 (13%, about 1 in every 8) said they had thought about asking a doctor to hasten their child's death

13 (9%, almost 1 in every 10) actually discussed it with caregivers

5 (4%) explicitly asked a clinician for medications to end the child’s life

3 (2%) reported that their child’s life was intentionally ended with medication. In all three cases the medication used was morphine.

36% (49 of 136, about 1 in every 3) in retrospect, would have considered discussing HD under certain circumstances with a breakdown of scenarios given.

Uncontrollable pain was the most common circumstance to elicit a hypothetical consideration of HD. 15% would have considered HD for non-physical suffering.

Only 2 parents would have considered HD in circumstances not directly related to the child’s experience, (family witnessing suffering or medical costs).

94% endorsed proportionately intensive symptom management for a terminally ill child with uncontrolled excruciating pain, while only 54% did so in the case of coma; these results did not change when adjusting for race and religiousness.

50% (1 in every 2) endorsed HD in at least one vignette. 59% would agree with a physician discussing HD in the case of a child with terminal cancer in pain or coma.

Of the 19 who considered HD during their child’s EOL course 16 (84%) endorsed HD in vignettes.

In general, being white (not Hispanic) and being not very religious were associated with endorsing HD in vignettes.

• Greater ICU use in the last 6 months of life
• Larger size, and
• For-profit ownership vs government ownership