SESSION DESCRIPTION
Today hospice and palliative care face the same issues as the rest of Medicine—scams and AI and private equity and bureaucratization. Demoralization. But magnified because hospice and palliative care attract some of the most idealistic.
In her talk, Dr. Sweet will discuss the takeover of Medicine by for-profit healthcare and how that happened. She will remind us of how hospice came to be, to fill the gap left when Medicine was technologized, and being with the dying patient was forgotten and even rejected. She will recall for us how compelling, how unique it is to sit with the dying and to sit with Death. Because it is real. And that reality is....Stirring.... Quiet...Mysterious. Worth it.
OBJECTIVES
- Understand what hospice and palliative care are facing--defunding, bureaucratization, private equity, money issues, demoralization, as profit takes over medicine
- Understand the history and development of hospice, Cicely Saunders and Elisabeth Kubler Ross, out of the premodern way of being with the dying and the dead.
- Remember why he or she is in this specialty, which is the remarkable sense of reality and importance that being in the presence of death gives, the only 100% prediction we can make about anyone's life.
FACULTY
Victoria Sweet, MD, PhD
Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine, University of California San Francisco
Grace Dammann, MD
Medical Director, Pain Clinic, Laguna Honda Hospital