Hospice Palliative Care Education and Training Emphasized
David Tharp
The Nippon Foundation
The Nippon Foundation
More Programs Planned for Nurse and Doctors in Japan
Indepth Articles
[Feb. 15, 2010]
Hospice palliative care is a specialized branch of medicine that requires deep compassion and psychological training. Hospice staff education for nurses and doctors provides methods and perspectives of care that are usually not used in a general hospital setting.
Palliative care, which means supporting patients and their families through the emotional pain of a life threatening, or life ending illness, also includes whatever appropriate medical treatment is needed.
However, palliative care is not just about dying. It affirms life, encouraging patients to live as well as one can before the illness takes its course leading to death.
The Nippon Foundation Hospice Committee was established in 1996 to do palliative care research and provide expert lectures and educational training materials about such care for doctors and nurses working in hospices and palliative care facilities throughout Japan.
Palliative care may be provided in a general hospital ward, a palliative care unit in the hospital, or in an independent facility. Palliative care is also offered by medical organizations on a home visit basis – usually clinical visits by trained nurses. Under these definitions there are presently 193 facilities nationwide in Japan that offer palliative care.
The World Health Organization defines palliative care as an approach that improves the quality of life of patients and their families facing the problem associated with life-threatening illness, through the prevention and relief of suffering by means of early identification and impeccable assessment and treatment of pain and other problems, physical, psychosocial and spiritual.
Palliative care:
- provides relief from pain and other distressing symptoms;
- affirms life and regards dying as a normal process;
- intends neither to hasten or postpone death;
- integrates the psychological and spiritual aspects of patient care;
- offers a support system to help patients live as actively as possible until death;
- offers a support system to help the family cope during the patients illness and in their own bereavement;
- uses a team approach to address the needs of patients and their families, including bereavement counselling, if indicated;
- will enhance quality of life, and may also positively influence the course of illness;
- is applicable early in the course of illness, in conjunction with other therapies that are intended to prolong life, such as chemotherapy or radiation therapy, and includes those investigations needed to better understand and manage distressing clinical complications.
The Japanese Nursing Association and National Education Committees of 11 organizations has thus far collaborated with The Nippon Foundation Hospice Committee in palliative care training for more than 2000 nurses.
Since 2001, 36 medical doctors have also been trained in palliative care for placement in hospice care facilities. However, there is still a big shortage of doctors in recent years and this problem is likely to persist.
The Hospice Committee, therefore, wants to give medical students the opportunity to learn about palliative care from an early stage of their studies.
At this point, a unified national palliative care education program has yet to be introduced in medical universities. However, a committee of prominent palliative care experts is actively working on introducing such a program.
The Nippon Foundation is strongly supporting this initiative through its Hospice Committee of experts and volunteers, who are actively providing hospice and palliative care courses.
The committee has produced a DVD entitled “History of Hospice Palliative Care -- Listening to the Voices of Patients. " For more information about this DVD and The Nippon Foundation for Charitable and Welfare Support Group Volunteer Team.
the Palliative Care Education Program Coordinating Committee attended by The Nippon Foundation Chairman Yohei Sasakawa (on the right in the above photo)