Pallicovid ECHO, a FREE online training program, is a collaborative effort by Pallium India and PalliCovidKerala.
Objective:
To empower healthcare providers treating people with advanced COVID-19 to relieve the suffering of patients and families.
This program is not intended to make the participants palliative care experts; but rather to empower them to manage people with advanced Covid19 with palliative care practices that are appropriate to the Indian setting. It is expected that this will reduce the sense of helplessness of the staff and improve their work-satisfaction and morale. It will also significantly lessen the burden on the health care system which would have been pressurized to find resources like ventilators. And most importantly, it would replace pointless aggressive life support measures (which only adds to the suffering of patients and families) with humane and compassionate end-of-life care.
Background:
Palliative care is alleviation of serious illness related suffering of the patient and the family. It involves prevention, assessment and management of symptoms including pain, breathlessness and agitation and providing psychological, social and spiritual support.
The commonest symptoms in COVID-19 are
- Fever; tiredness
- Cough; breathlessness
- Confusion; agitation
In advanced COVID-19, recovery after artificial ventilation of the lungs seems to happen only in about 3% people; that too in the young rather than the old.
How to register
Fill up this form to register for the course for FREE: https://forms.gle/iVkatXTKvBn8Nx1R9
Program Details
Date: Monday to Friday (5 days).
Time: Daily 5 PM – 6.15 PM IST
The session on each day will include a didactic session for 20 to 30 minutes followed by several case scenarios and discussion. Participation for the program will be limited to 50 to permit adequate interaction. Depending on demand, we shall increase the number of programs.
View Resources for the course: https://palliumindia.org/2020/06/resources-for-palliative-care-in-the-context-of-covid19
Who can participate?
Healthcare providers who will be managing patients with COVID-19
How to join the session:
ECHO Sessions are conducted through ZOOM video conferencing App which can be downloaded (free download) from Google play store (Android) or App Store (iOS) for mobile phones or direct download from internet for Windows.
Download from: https://zoom.us/download
Contact
For more information on this program or for any assistance, please call us at +91-90721 01146 or write to tipsecho@palliumindia.org
About the ECHO program:
Project ECHO (Extension for Community Healthcare Outcome) is an online educational movement, initiated by Dr. Sanjeev Arora in New Mexico to increase workforce capacity to provide optimal care. Project ECHO is being implemented by over 220 partners in more than 39 countries across the globe.
About us:
Pallium India is a registered charitable trust aimed at integration of palliative care in all of the health system in India through delivery of services, education, capacity building, policy, research, advocacy and information. It has established the Trivandrum Institute of Palliative Sciences which has been using the ECHO model for palliative care education for the last three years.
PallicovidKerala is an informal group of 22 like-minded palliative care physicians. The group was created with the aim of developing guidelines and common strategies to deal with the impact of COVID19 pandemic on people needing palliative care as well as on professionals looking after such patients.