2014; Volume 15, No 5, May
Announcements
Leading the way in palliative nursing education in Eastern Europe
Laura Losub, Public Relations Coordinator for Education and Development at HOSPICE Casa Sperantei, Brasov, Romania, describes a new leadership course that is designed specifically for experienced nurses from Eastern Europe.
Twenty nurses from specialised palliative care services in five Eastern European countries will benefit from free education and training through a new Transformational Leadership Programme. The main goal of the programme is to empower palliative care nurses to enhance the quality of care for patients with complex, life-threatening illness and families in their countries. The course is organised and delivered by HOSPICE Casa Sperantei, a designated Palliative Care Center of Excellence in Eastern Europe and a global model of education and palliative care. Since 1997, we have trained more than 15,000 professionals from Romania, Moldova, Serbia, Ukraine, Russia, Bulgaria, Greece, Macedonia, Armenia, Kosovo, Albania, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Czech Republic, Georgia, Hungary, Poland and Germany. The nursing education curriculum of both HOSPICE Casa Sperantei and the Transformational Leadership Programme follows the recommendations of the Guide for the Development of Palliative Nurse Education in Europe. Since 1997, more than 3,000 nurses from Romania and 13 countries in the region have been trained through this curriculum.
Now, thanks to funding from the Bristol-Myers Squibb Foundation USA, through The Bridging Cancer Care Initiative in Central and Eastern Europe, we’re inviting palliative care nurses from Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Russia and Romania to enroll on our Transformational Leadership Program: Empowering Palliative Care Nurses to Enhance the Quality of Care for Patients with Complex, Life-Threatening Illness and their Families. You must already be working in a leadership position and have a good command of written and spoken English.
We hope that this course will enable to nurses to get good quality training and become future leaders in palliative care in their countries. The program includes a five-day residential course in Brasov in September followed by one year of distance mentorship.
The course will help participants to develop management and team leadership capabilities, and will include identifying personal self in the leadership trajectory, demonstrating communication skills in addressing conflicts, analyzing the circle of influence and how it applies to leadership development, and defining roles and contributions in expanding, promoting and sustaining palliative care.
We’re delighted for this further opportunity to work across borders with international colleagues and look forward to welcoming you on our new course.”
Go to eligibility and an online application form, or contact Flavia Hurducas.
Deadline for applications: 20 May 2014.
6th Annual Spirituality and Health Summer Institute.
July 23-26, Washington, DC
The 2014 Spirituality and Health Summer Institute will address spirituality as a solution to the current challenges in our healthcare system. It will look for opportunities in the changing healthcare environment, in which spirituality can be integrated as an essential component of care.
Participants of the 6th Annual Summer Institute will:
- Discuss evidence for spiritual care and compassionate presence, the tools to bring spirituality to the forefront of clinical care, and the roles of members of the interdisciplinary team.
- Participate in experiential learning, including large- and small-group case-based discussions and treatment/care plan development by interdisciplinary teams with standardized patients.
- Meet and network with colleagues from around the world and work with them to come up with new ideas and thoughts on the development of whole person care.
Information on how to submit an abstract for poster presentations.
The Open Society Foundations (OSF) recently announced the retirement of Mary Callaway, the Director of the International Palliative Care Initiative the end of 2014.
Mary and Dr. Kathleen Foley, the Medical Director of IPCI have led the Open Society Foundations’ efforts to develop the field of palliative care since 1994. Their work began with the creation of the Project on Death in America (PDIA), a nine-year, $45 million effort to transform the culture of death in the United States.
The work of PDIA was recently chronicled in David Clark’s 2013 book, Transforming the Culture of Dying: The Work of the Project on Death in America, published by the Oxford University Press. In 1998, PDIA began funding internationally in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. They expanded to South Africa in 2003, when the International Palliative Care Initiative (IPCI) formally became an initiative of the OSF Public Health Program. In the last ten years, IPCI has expanded and played a unique and leading role in defining palliative care as a global public health issue and in advocating for pain relief and palliative care as human rights.
OSF has become the world’s only donor to support a full range of activities related to palliative care development. These include international advocacy, leadership development and fellowships, expanded access to opioids for pain relief, education and training of health care professionals, public awareness, legal and human rights action, reform of national health policies, establishing legal and economic frameworks, and developing resource training centers as model service programs.
The Public Health Program’s commitment to palliative care will continue and will focus on opportunities arising from the World Health Assembly resolution on palliative care and the UN General Assembly Special Session on Drugs in 2016.
A position announcement for the Project Director for International Palliative Care Advocacy has beenposted on the OSF website.