Hospice Foundation of America
E-Newsletter
Volume 6, Issue 6
June 2006
http://www.hospicefoundation.org
In this issue:
- Message from David Abrams, President/CEO
- Focus on: An Interview with Kenneth Doka
- HFA’s 14th Annual National Bereavement Teleconference, Living With Grief: Before and After the Death
- What's New @ HFA
- Pain Management at the End of Life
- Upcoming Conferences and Educational Opportunities
Message from David Abrams, President/CEO
Starting about June lots of workers begin to power down a few notches for the summer, and many Americans glide through daily tasks in anticipation of vacation or the weekends. It seems to be one of the rhythms of life. At HFA, this is one of our intense learning periods. From early fall through next spring, when we broadcast the Living With Grief teleconference, we’re in a speed mode. We're pleased to let you know that the 2007 teleconference broadcast will be Thursday, March 22 from 1:30pm-4:00pm. Soon we'll be going 110 miles per hour, working to get the program out. Decisions will be made quickly without the luxury of time for debate or reflection. But in this post-teleconference period we have the time to respond to the questions that were called in, to read the evaluations of teleconference participants and ponder future programs. It’s a serious time of the year for us because we read every single comment that people send, whether on the CE evaluation or the on-line survey, and we try to draw from them process improvement techniques and ideas for future programs. The questions called in to the live program provide us with valuable insight into what our audience is thinking about. Taken all together, these venues provide the intellectual basis for everything we do in the future. You can see why we would take this time of the year so seriously. But by the end of summer we too want to power down a little, and so we forego our August edition of the e-newsletter. While we’re goofing off on that, we hope to see some of you at the beach or camping in the mountains.
Focus on: An Interview with Dr. Kenneth Doka
Dr. Kenneth Doka is Professor of Gerontology at the Graduate School of the College of New Rochelle and an ordained Lutheran minister. He is Bereavement Consultant to Hospice Foundation of America and has participated in the planning and production of all thirteen HFA National Bereavement Teleconferences. Well into planning for the 14th program, Living With Grief: Before and After the Death, Dr. Doka talks about how the old paradigms of grief and bereavement are being challenged; some trends he sees in the field; and how these theories and knowledge can be translated into professional practice.
Dr. Doka reminds us that grief is an intensely personal process. A recent email served as a powerful reminder of the challenges inherent in that process. The writer bravely shared her story: …I have been having a lot of trouble dealing with things and have been visiting the counselor at hospice for a while now. Never during my visit with them did I mention something that was bothering me so badly but I was too embarrassed to talk about. When I read the article in Journeys “When You Cannot Pray” I couldn’t believe it. I thought I was alone with this but now I see I am not. I felt so relieved when I read this article. I am having a terrible time with prayer and I felt so alone, like I was the only one this happened to. I thank you so much for this article. It was a gift to me and I imagine to a lot of other people out there. This is something that someone with a lifelong faith would find very hard to admit and totally not understood. Thank you so much for running this story. It meant the world to me.
HFA’s 14th Annual National Bereavement Teleconference, Living With Grief: Before and After the Death
HFA’s 14th annual National Bereavement Teleconference, Living With Grief: Before and After the Death, will be broadcast Thursday, March 22, 2007 from 1:30--4:00pm. This teleconference, as well as the accompanying book, will explore the most current theoretical perspectives on loss and grief as experienced by persons throughout a life-limiting illness and by survivors after the death. A particular focus will be paid to areas where understandings of grief have been challenged. The program will be useful to a range of professionals who counsel persons who are bereaved including psychologists, counselors, clergy, social workers, nurses and other health care workers, and funeral directors, as well as educators, teachers and school-based personnel. The information will also be helpful to individuals who offer education on loss, grief, dying or death.
A panel of experts will examine and discuss the following topics:
- Anticipatory grief and anticipatory mourning: approaches that professional caregivers can use to assist patients and families struggling with loss in life-threatening illness;
- Strategies and interventional approaches that professional caregivers can use at the moment of death and in funeral rituals to help survivors cope with loss;
- Ways that our understandings of grief have changed over the last 20 years and how changes have influenced practice;
- Research on the effectiveness of grief interventions;
- The current debate over a new DSM diagnostic category for complicated grief; and
- Current research and theory on grief reactions of professional caregivers, and ways that individuals and organizations can effectively support grieving staff and volunteers.
HFA received many questions via phone during the live teleconference broadcast in April that could not be answered on the air. The panelists have contributed a Questions and Answers section to HFA’s website. The Question and Answer feature is part of a larger set of resources on Pain Management and other past teleconference topics; this section of HFA’s website allows ongoing access to education and resources on a wide range of subjects.
HFA's new hospice locator, www.hospicedirectory.org, has been improved to allow a single user to register multiple hospice locations. This improvement allows a corporate office to control its company's registration and profile information through a single user. More than 3,000 hospices can be found at www.hospicedirectory.org, and 300 hospices have become official members during the last month. Membership occurs with registration and will always be free. Built to be a tool for consumers, referral sources, and hospices, Hospicedirectory.org is the most comprehensive hospice search engine in North America. Visit www.hospicedirectory.org to register your hospice today.
Pain Management at the End of Life
The 2 ½ hour DVD of the “Pain Management at the End of Life: Bridging the Gap Between Knowledge and Practice” teleconference is now available. Please call 800-854-3402 or order here. The edited 1-hour version will be available in July.
Thanks to those who completed CEs online! If you used the online process, we’d like your input as we work to improve the system for next year. If you haven’t already done so, please take a short survey here. Five respondents will be entered to win a free copy of HFA’s award-winning book, “A Guide to Recalling and Telling Your Life Story.”
Upcoming Conferences and Educational Opportunities
Register now for the American Academy of Pain Management’s 17th Annual Clinical Meeting, “Beyond Boundaries: Forging New Alliances in Pain Management,” September 7--10.The Academy's Annual Clinical Meeting is an inclusive gathering of pain management clinicians, from a variety of disciplines and medical traditions, who join together in the spirit of cooperation to learn and share ideas about ways to improve care for those who live with pain. Attendee Early Bird Registration ends July 1.
This newsletter is sent to more than 6,450 subscribers on the 2nd Wednesday of every month to keep you informed of what is happening in the fields of hospice, grief and bereavement, and caregiving, as well as what's new at HFA. We encourage you to forward this e-newsletter to an interest colleague or friend. To subscribe, go to HFA's E-Newsletter sign-up page.
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This newsletter is published by Hospice
Foundation of America
David Abrams, President and CEO
http://www.hospicefoundation.org/
Board of Directors: Thomas E. Bryant, MD, JD; Myra MacPherson; Priscilla Perry; Patricia Spulak; Thomas
Spulak
©
Hospice Foundation of America 2006
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