By Emma Brady
A Birmingham medic has criticised the clinical community for not placing enough importance on palliative care, despite the recent introduction of the Government’s End of Life Strategy.
Dr Steve Plenderleith believes medical students are not encouraged to spend time with patients suffering from terminal or long-term conditions, and as a result “have little or no experience of patient death”.
Palliative care is treatment given to alleviate symptoms or pain of a life-long or terminal condition. When the Government announced its new End of Life Strategy in June, it promised to invest pounds 286 million into the sector over three years to improve access to services and GP training.
But Dr Plenderleith, palliative care consultant at St Mary’s Hospice, in Selly Park, claims trainee medics need more than “the cursory few hours” crammed on to most medical school courses.
He believes seriously ill patients are “falling through the cracks” as a result because GPs either do not know how to access hospice services, what care they provide and where it is provided.
“The whole point of this new strategy is to get a more seamless pattern of care, so people don’t fall through the cracks, across different settings – hospice, hospital, and home,” said Dr Plenderleith. “Medical students have very little, if any, training in palliative care and so it’s often seen as an add-on, so we’ve got doctors coming through who have little or no experience of patient death or how the role palliative care can play in patients’ lives.
“I’d like to get them for a week and show them what a hospice does, how it operates, and get used to talking to patients with terminal conditions from a spiritual and emotional perspective, rather than just taking a dry, basic history.”
He added: “Whether they like it or not the End of Life Strategy is going to be rammed down clinicians throats. It’s not acceptable to have this widening gap, and it shouldn’t be an us and them situation, so hopefully its implementation will change that.
“Since the Cancer Plan was first introduced eight years ago, oncology services have developed fantastically and as such five year survival rates have improved, more people are getting the treatment they deserve and need, and living longer with the disease.”
St Mary’s Hospice already provides specialist training for local medics and healthcare professionals, in partnership with University Hospital Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust.
Last week it ran a one-off workshop training staff from both UHB and St Mary’s on how to administer intraspinal infusions, not usually done outside hospitals, to treat one cancer patient for whom traditional pain relief is not working.
Dr Plenderleith is planning a series of palliative care road shows around Birmingham “to find out where these cracks are” in November.
Dr Liz Hughes, postgraduate medical dean at NHS West Midlands Deanery, the regional body responsible for medical students’ training, stated that all trainee GPs get “at least a week” for a palliative care placement.
She said: “The majority of palliative care is carried out within the community, which they will see more of as they work with GP teams, district nurses and so on.
“With an ageing population living even longer we will see an increased need for palliative care.
We do take it very seriously and in order to do so we need to train our GPs to have a better understanding of what it means, that it’s not just about patients living with cancer, but with other conditions as well.”
(c) 2008 Birmingham Post; Birmingham (UK). Provided by ProQuest LLC. All rights Reserved.
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