Advanced Education Series - Palliative Care (50 Licenses)
Overview
Palliative care has been described as an extra layer of support for patients and their families dealing with a serious or advanced illness. The Advanced Education Certification Palliative Care Series provides the learner with a broad spectrum of topics that will facilitate the development of a highly applicable skill set when caring for this population. The series begins with the origin of hospice and palliative care in the US, using data to support the impact of palliative care. Additional topics include an overview of communication and healthcare decision-making and psychosocial/spiritual/cultural care in serious illness. The balance of the series provides practice information on the assessment and management of physical pain and an opportunity to develop expertise in the pharmacology of nonopioid, opioid, and adjuvant analgesics. Participants will develop expertise in the management of nonpain symptoms including gastrointestinal, cardiopulmonary, neuropsychiatric, and genitourinary. We will also describe alternative routes of medication administration, deprescribing, and best practices in educating patients and informal caregivers. Rounding out this program will be 5 case-based sessions where learners can apply and pull together all the information taught in this series. Palliative care touches every field, every practice, and potentially every patient and family. This is an outstanding opportunity to acquire the skills to provide superior care to this vulnerable population.
This certification comprises 20 CE/CME hours of modules with self-assessment quizzes, PLUS a bonus 4 hours composed of three segments: 1) summaries of key learnings, 2) case studies, and 3) faculty panel discussion.
Course Outline
- Pain Pathogenesis
- Pain Assessment
- Pharmacology of non-opioids
- Opioid pharmacology
- Opioid conversion calculations
- Pharmacology of adjuvant analgesics
- Methadone dosing
- Complicated pain management (ketamine, lidocaine, topical analgesics)`
- Dosage adjustment of analgesics in organ dysfunction`
- Monitoring and adjusting analgesic regimens`
- Psychosocial/spiritual/cultural care`
- Alternate routes of medication administration in palliative care
- Gastrointestinal symptoms part 1 (constipation, diarrhea)
- Gastrointestinal symptoms part 2 (nausea/vomiting)`
- Cardiopulmonary symptoms (cough, hiccups, dyspnea)`
- Neuropsychiatric symptoms part 1 (agitation, confusion, delirium, insomnia, depression, anxiety)`
- Genitourinary symptoms (bladder spasms, overactive bladder, UTI management) and Miscellaneous symptoms (pruritus, etc.)`
- Deprescribing
- Educating patients and informal caregivers on medication management
- Panel Discussion