Delivering excellent End of Life Care in the Emergency Care is a real challenge but also a huge privilege and has formed some of the most rewarding parts of our careers to date.
We’ve been really keen to End of Life Care as a topic for a while now. Many, if not all of you, will have been out to these patients or received them in your ED.
They aren’t simple cases to manage, with lots of issues around scope of practice, lack of alternative care pathways, confusion surrounding legal documentation and many studies have identified a lack of education around palliative care.
In this episode we’ll do our best to demystify those medico-legal terms, talk about care pathways and options that may be available to us, have a think about how we can talk with patients about death and then go on to discuss the clinical care we might need to deliver and the wider holistic nature of caring for these patients and their loved ones.
We’re lucky enough to be joined by Ed Presswood, who’s a palliative care consultant and clearly an expert on the topic. We gained a massive amount from this episode and we hope you find it really useful too.
You’ll find the hyperlinks to some fantastic resources on the topic over on the webpage at TheResusRoom.
Once again we’d love to hear any comments or questions either via the website or social media.
Enjoy!
Simon, Rob & James
Now that you have listened to the podcast, start the quiz to add it to your CPD Diary
References
RCEM; End of Life Toolkit
‘The palliative care ambulance’: A qualitative study of patient and caregiver perspectives of an ambulance service – Aileen Collier, Ann Dadich, Cathie Jeffs, Andrew Noble, Gregory B Crawford, 2023
Palliative care in paramedic practice: A retrospective cohort study. Lord. Palliat Med. 2019
Marie Curie; Better End of Life 2022
Attitudes and knowledge of emergency doctors towards end-of-life care in the emergency department: a national survey. Saeed. Eur J Emerg Med. 2023
Emergency medical services and palliative care: a scoping review. Gage. BMJ Open. 2023
I wish, I worry, I wonder. This is such a powerful take home from this absolutely excellent podcast. Thank you for tackling this really important aspect of Emergency Care.
Good Job. thank you!
Absolutely brilliant episode, really well explained! Thank you!
Brilliant episode thanks