GeriPal

How do you teach communication in serious illness?  Can you?  Do you teach it the same way to doctors and nurses in training?  What level trainee do you target - medical students, interns, residents?  How do we know our teaching is working?

We discuss these and other bread and butter communication issues with Dr. Wendy Anderson, a palliative care physician at UCSF, director of the Bay Area Hub for Vitaltalk, and leader of IMPACT-ICU, a project to train ICU nurses in communication.  

In this week's podcast we talk with Helen Kales, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Michigan the VA Center for Clinical Management and Research. 

We've spent a great deal of effort in Geriatrics describing what we shouldn't do to address behavioral symptoms in dementia: physical restraints, antipsychotics, sedating antidepressants.  Helen Kales was lecturing around the country about all of these things we shouldn't do a few years back, and people would raise their hands and ask, "Well, what should we do?" She realized she needed to give caregivers tools to help.