Skip to main content

Good Luck on the Hospice and Palliative Medicine Boards!!!


We just want to wish good luck to all those taking the 2012 Hospice and Palliative care board exams today and tomorrow.  We know you'll rock the test! 

We also want to say thanks for taking the time to read through the Blogs 2 Boards questions developed by GeriPal and Pallimed.  We have had nearly 11,000 views of the Blogs 2 Boards webpage and plenty of more hits to the other Blogs 2 Board posts.  

If you have any feedback on how we can make the questions better for the next round of tests, please feel free to email me.

Thanks and good luck!

by: Eric and the rest of the blogs to boards team.





Comments

Anonymous said…
Thank you so much for the Blogs 2 Boards series. I found it very helpful. I feel that the blogs 2 boards questions were clinical and logical while a lot of the actual exam questions were touchy feely and open to interpretation. They need to do a better job of reducing ambiguity in their questions. You guys on the other hand, did us a great service!
October 6, 2012 at 8:01 AM
Anonymous said…
I agree on both points.
Blogs to boards a good resource.
The exam has a long way to go to make it an objective measure of the palliative medicine body of knowledge. Maybe it just reflects how far the specialty needs to go in research etc...
Was surprised by the shear number of pediatric questions. It does not really reflect the setting where the overwhelming majority of us pratice.
October 6, 2012 at 9:07 AM
Anonymous said…
Did the boards yesterday. There were many pediatric questions anybody has any ides as why is that? Children census is extremely low in Hospice reflecting the general death rate nation wide...
October 6, 2012 at 12:17 PM
Anonymous said…
How do you write an exam when there is no evidence? Check out the ABIM palliative medicine boards.
October 9, 2012 at 5:21 AM
Anonymous said…
I thought the board exam was terribly unreflective of the work done in palliative care, at least on our busy service at an academic medical center. I would say more than half the content had nothing to do with my work. Many questions were terribly written and ambiguous. Content was far too heavy around pediatrics as the others stated. Also content is very heavy on bereavement and grief.

Lastly it seems like in palliative care we stress the importance of teamwork and that the physician does not always need to be the team leader, yet the board content seemed to indicate we have to have expertise in aspects of care that would be provided by other disciplines in the team.
October 14, 2012 at 8:22 PM
Humaira said…
Many of us do not pay attention to these bad elements and not taking good care of our health. We have to remember that our health & physical and mental well being is the mirror of our personality, so we have to take very good care of our health to live a healthy and happy life. Online Amiodarone
October 24, 2012 at 10:59 AM
Anonymous said…
I passed! Good luck to others. Was a brutal exam.
December 21, 2012 at 1:36 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Dangers of Fleet Enemas

The dangers of oral sodium phosphate preparations are fairly well known in the medical community. In 2006 the FDA issued it’s first warning that patients taking oral sodium phosphate preparations are at risk for potential for acute kidney injury. Two years later, over-the-counter preparations of these drugs were voluntarily withdrawn by the manufacturers.  Those agents still available by prescription were given black box warnings mainly due to acute phosphate nephropathy that can result in renal failure, especially in older adults. Despite all this talk of oral preparations, little was mentioned about a sodium phosphate preparation that is still available over-the-counter – the Fleet enema.

Why Oral Sodium Phosphate Preparations Are Dangerous 

Before we go into the risks of Fleet enemas, lets spend just a couple sentences on why oral sodium phosphate preparations carry significant risks. First, oral sodium phosphate preparations can cause significant fluid shifts within the colon …
7 comments
Read more

Length of Stay in Nursing Homes at the End of Life

One out of every four of us will die while residing in a nursing home. For most of us, that stay in a nursing home will be brief, although this may depend upon social and demographic variables like our gender, net worth, and marital status. These are the conclusions of an important new study published in JAGS by Kelly and colleagues (many of whom are geripal contributors, including Alex Smith and Ken Covinsky).

The study authors used data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to describe the lengths of stay of older adults who resided in nursing homes at the end of life. What they found was that out of the 8,433 study participants who died between 1992 and 2006, 27.3% of resided in a nursing home prior to their death. Most of these patients (70%) actually died in the nursing home without being transferred to another setting like a hospital.

 The length of stay data were striking:

the median length of stay in a nursing home before death was 5 months the average length of stay was l…
13 comments
Read more

Opening the Black Box of LTACs: Podcast with Anil Makam

What happens in Long Term Acute Care Hospitals, or LTACs (pronounced L-tacs)?  I've never been in one.  I've sent patients to them - usually patients with long ICU stays, chronically critically ill, with a gastric feeding tube and a trach for ventilator support.  For those patients, the goals (usually as articulated by the family) are based on a hope for recovery of function and a return home.

And yet we learn some surprising things from Anil Makam, Assistant Professor of Medicine at UCSF.  In his JAGS study of about 14,000 patients admitted to LTACHs, the average patient spent two thirds of his or her remaining life in an institutional settings (including hospitals, LTACs and skilled nursing facilities).  One third died in an LTAC, never returning home.

So you would think with this population of older people with serious illness and a shorter prognosis than many cancers, we would have robust geriatrics and palliative care in LTACs?  Right? Wrong.

3% were seen by a geriatrici…
1 comment
Read more