Upcoming: Online Foundation Course in Palliative Medicine (for doctors)
Project ECHO® is an online lifelong learning and guided practice model that revolutionizes medical education and exponentially increases workforce capacity to provide best practice specialty care and reduce health disparities through its hub-and-spoke knowledge-sharing networks.
Click here to read more about the TIPS-ECHO Program.
The Objective of the Online Foundation Course in Palliative Medicine is to train healthcare professionals in pain management and palliative care.
To ensure adequate interaction during sessions, we will have to limit the number of participants at each course on a first-come, first-served basis. So register quickly!
Eligibility
M.B.B.S or B.D.S with permanent registration with medical council.
Class Details
Classes Scheduled: 18 Sessions
Start Date: 01 May 2019
End Date: 28 Aug 2019
Day of the week: Wednesdays
Class Timing: 3:00 PM – 4:30 PM
Attendance
Participants need to attend all sessions. If one is unable to attend a session, due to unexpected emergency, they should watch the session videos provided and mail us back a summary of the class. Course certificate can be issued only to those who have attended minimum 80% of the sessions in person.
Features of Online Foundation Course in Palliative Medicine
- Prescribed syllabus-oriented courses
- 1 session per week
- Pre-test and post-test for assessment
- Case Presentation by a participant in each session
- Regular assignments
- Participants are provided with various learning materials for different topics
- Several articles regarding subject shared
- Certificate issuance at the end.
How to apply
Download the application form, fill it up and send it to tipsecho@palliumindia.org
How to join the session
ECHO is conducted through ZOOM application which can be downloaded(free download) from Google play store for mobile phones and direct download from internet for Windows.
Download from: https://zoom.us/download
Click here for instructions on how to download and join a meeting
Contact
For more information on this course or for any assistance, please call us at +91-6282902450 or write to us: tipsecho@palliumindia.org
Clinical Director: Dr M. R. Rajagopal
Project Facilitator: Dr Sunilkumar M. M.
Project Coordinator: Ms Rajalekshmi Balu
Videos of Previous Sessions
This woman went to a hospital for a surgery that should ordinarily have been very painful. She required no pain medicines except for one dose of Paracetamol, which possibly she did not need. An astute doctor was curious. He went into her medical history: at the age of 65, she had undergone a hip surgery which again should have been painful, but wasn’t. This time, it led to research, which showed that she had not only no pain sensation; but also never experienced any anxiety about anything. She would know of a burn on her skin only when she smelled burning flesh! Her wounds heal fast. The geneticists’ search led to a pseudogene.
Now here is how we, non-geneticists, interpret this:
Pseudogenes are junk genes, so far thought to be of no use. Their presence caused the woman’s freedom from pain. We now understand that they are not really junk genes; they could potentially lead us to safe ways of relieving pain.
Interestingly, of her two children, the daughter feels pain normally, but her son has diminished pain sensation, though not complete loss of pain as in the mother.
This is different from the total absence of pain that some children may be born with. In such cases, children sustain injuries because of pain as a protectant, and die in childhood.
The article is available for free download at: https://bjanaesthesia.org/article/S0007-0912(19)30138-2/pdf
Can someone who understands genetics give us more information about this pseudogene and its potential impact, in layman’s language? We will be very grateful.
World Health Day, 7th April 2019, saw palliative care nurses from the four southern districts of Kerala getting together at Kollam for a day to absorb more knowledge about palliative care and nursing. Organising team at Kollam, thank you for giving this opportunity for a large number of representatives from Pallium India along with other nurses.
The nurses left with a resolution to plan for weekly educational programmes in each district. The importance of this cannot be underrated. The tiny state of Kerala has more than a 1000 palliative care nurses – more than 90% of them reaching patients and families in their homes. The more empowered they are, the better the quality of health care in the state; and the less the suffering in the community.
So could death at home be a romantic dream rather than practical reality?
Researchers from University of Missouri-Columbia challenge the oft-held view about “death at home” in the article, “The myth of ‘no place like home’ when it comes to end of life” published on 03 April 2019. The study finds that “home deaths can be physically and emotionally challenging, especially for caregivers”. We need to think, could this challenge be even greater in our country where palliative care services are able to give only even less support at home?
Please read the abstract of the article: The Motivations and Consequences of Dying at Home: Family Caregiver Perspectives
Thank you Barry Ashpole and Media Watch for bringing this to our attention.
Mahatma Gandhi said, “A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history.”
And here is some living proof.
Please see this success story from Vietnam:
Thank you e-hospice, for bringing this to our attention.
