Letting Go by Atul Gawande: How Hospice and Palliative Care Can Transform the Healthcare System is available for 90 days after enrollment.

This session was recorded at NHPCO’s 27th Management & Leadership Conference in National Harbor, MD

Letting Go: How Hospice and Palliative Care Can Transform the Healthcare System In his highly acclaimed article published in the July 2010 New Yorker, Dr. Atul Gawande challenged the status quo with this statement:

"Our system of technological medical care has utterly failed to meet these needs, and the cost of this failure is measured in far more than dollars. The hard question we face, then, is not how we can afford this system’s expense. It is how we can build a health-care system that will actually help dying patients achieve what’s most important to them at the end of their lives."

Later in that article Dr Gawande recognizes the contributions of hospice in creating a new framework for how people die:

"Hospice has tried to offer a new ideal for how we die. Although not everyone has embraced its rituals, those who have are helping to negotiate an ars moriendi for our age. But doing so represents a struggle—not only against suffering but also against the seemingly unstoppable momentum of medical treatment."

Dr. Gawande will speak to the leaders of the nation’s hospice and palliative care organizations regarding his thoughts on how we can bring our “new ideal for how we die” to the broader healthcare system.

Objectives:

• Discuss the failure of modern healthcare to meet the needs of dying Americans
• Describe the tension between palliative/hospice care and medical treatment
• Identify opportunities for hospice/palliative care values and approaches to be incorporated into the healthcare system

Atul Gawande, MD

Atul Gawande is a surgeon, writer, and public health researcher. He practices general and endocrine surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. He is also Associate Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School and Associate Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health.

His research work currently focuses on systems innovations to transform safety and performance in surgery, childbirth, and care of the terminally ill. He has been a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine since 1998 and has written three New York Times bestselling books.

You will have access to this course for 90 days from the date of purchase.

Course Release Date: 5/1/2012

Course Expiration Date: 5/1/2015

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