Fellowship Program Teaches Physicians to Offer Comprehensive Palliative Care
When a patient faces the often painful and debilitating effects of a chronic illness, palliative care is one of the options available to help ease the discomfort.
Palliative care focuses specifically on managing the discomfort associated with a patient's chronic illnesses. The patient’s illness may not necessarily be a terminal illness.
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Dr. Christi Stewart (left) and Dr. Kempe Jacobowitz Ames
are the first two fellows in the Hospice and Palliative
Medicine Fellowship Program. |
Palliative care can be provided in a hospital, at home or within a hospice program. The duration of palliative care may be long-term—over several years—or short-term, lasting days or weeks.
If the decision is made for this type of comfort care, the relationship between the patient and doctor can take on a new and different focus.
Because of the special needs it requires, Lancaster General and Hospice of Lancaster County offer the Hospice and Palliative Medicine Fellowship – a training program for physicians designed to enhance the skills necessary for a doctor to provide outstanding care to patients coping with the symptoms and stressors of advanced illness.
“These patients deserve the expert care that comes from a physician who understands all aspects of palliation and hospice care,” says Christine Stabler, M.D., Family & Community Medicine, Lancaster General.
However, she says there is a tremendous need for this type of service in the Lancaster County community. “Physicians who have this special training are in short supply,” Dr. Stabler says.
The one-year Hospice and Palliative Medicine Fellowship Program is offered jointly by our Department of Family & Community Medicine and Palliative Medicine Consultants of Hospice of Lancaster County.
The program provides post-graduate training for licensed, board-certified physicians who seek specialized training in hospice and palliative care. “It enables our physicians to give patients the best care possible," she says.
Comfort Care
Although Hospice and palliative care often work hand-in-hand, there are differences between the two.
Hospice care provides management of a broad range of symptoms and other end-of-life issues for people with weeks or months rather than years to live.
“Palliation means making the best of the situation at hand,” Dr. Stabler says. “Often it deals with pain, shortness of breath, chest discomfort or weakness and it consists of doing the very best for the patient to keep him or her functional and as comfortable as possible.”
The Fellowship Program
The Hospice and Palliative Medicine Fellowship is a sequence of courses that offer the knowledge and skills necessary to provide compassionate, competent palliative care. In addition to advanced pain management, physicians receive training on helping patients treat and manage symptoms such as shortness of breath and behavior issues related to dementia and depression.
Doctors also learn to manage end-of-life needs in patients with respect to their cultural and social preferences.
“The purpose of the program is to prepare physicians to be specialists in hospice and palliative medicine,” says Joan Harrold, M.D., Hospice of Lancaster County. “It's a specialty that addresses a wide range of issues.”
In addition to their physical symptoms, Dr. Harrold says patients who need the specialized type of skills that physicians obtain in the fellowship program can also have complex medical, family, social and spiritual needs. “We prepare physicians to competently address these needs as well.”
The curriculum for the Fellowship program, directed by Andrew Probolus, M.D., Hospice of Lancaster County, focuses on three main types of training:
- in-patient hospice care
- palliative medicine consulting in an acute-care hospital setting, and
- home hospice care.
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Dr. Andrew Probolus is the director of the Hospice and Palliative
Medicine Fellowship Program at Lancaster General and Hospice
of Lancaster County. |
“We also have physicians in the program spend some time in long-term care settings to learn how to provide palliative medicine in nursing homes,” Dr. Probolus says.
In addition to being adept at evaluating patients and creating treatment plans that will be effective in controlling their symptoms, he says that palliative care specialists “must have a high level of comfort caring for people who are dying, as well as working with their families and healthcare providers.”
For more information about hospice and palliative medicine talk to your family physician or call Palliative Medicine Consultants at Hospice of Lancaster County at 735-3131.
For more information about and the Hospice and Palliative Medicine Fellowship, call Family & Community Medicine at 544-4940.
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