StorytellERdoc

MARCH 18, 2020

Gone are the carefree smiles, the uncomplicated daily lives, and the thought that we and our families are immune to unexpected death. Friends and family have asked me my thoughts on Covid-19, maybe believing I have some special information simply from being on the front lines. Be patient when you are frustrated.

ER 100

ER Illness Physicals Provider 100

GeriPal

DECEMBER 14, 2023

More recently Sharon Kaufman ‘s book And a Time to Die described the ways in which physicians, nurses, hospital systems, and payment mechanisms influenced the hour and manner of patient’s deaths. Today Liz Dzeng discusses her journey towards studying this issue in detail. I guess the VA is federal though.

Hospital 125

Hospital IT Patient-Centered Patients 125

GeriPal

FEBRUARY 23, 2023

Summary Transcript Summary You know when you walk out of a patient’s room and have that sense, “This isn’t going to go well.” The patient is sick and getting sicker, and refuses to let you talk with family or other members of her inner circle. Should you stop at “no?” That’s a huge amount of news all at once. Lynn: I do.

Family 97

Family Families Patient-Centered IT 97

GeriPal

JANUARY 25, 2024

He also found gaps, including very few studies of patients with lung disease, and little impact of trials on quality of life. Your research is a lot in this patient population, right? The article we discuss today, also published in JAMA , addresses these two gaps. Big randomized control study that came out. Important implications.

Patient-Centered 122

Patient-Centered IT Illness Patients 122

GeriPal

MAY 22, 2025

Jenny Chen is a palliative care fellow at Yale who regularly sings for her seriously ill patients. Jenny reached out to us because she plays music regularly for her patients, and she said, you should do a podcast about music. And I performed for many palliative patients, and that’s when I started to understand.

IT 96

IT Patient-Centered Patients Board-Certified 96

GeriPal

SEPTEMBER 28, 2023

First, a clinician’s thoughts must be encoded into words, then transmitted often via sounds, and finally decoded back to thoughts by a patient or family member. Patient Values: Three Important Questions-Tell me more? Simple, right? Not so much, as each one of these steps is fraught with miscommunication. What else?

Family 144

Family Families Patient-Centered IT 144

GeriPal

JULY 11, 2024

It’s a jampacked 50 minutes, filled with pearls on taking care of patients with liver disease. Kirsten 04:16 So, in emergency medicine, obviously, we are interacting and caring for these both exciting and interesting, but also very complex and humbling patients to care for in the ED setting. What’s the connection and why?

Patient-Centered 109

Patient-Centered IT Patients Clinic 109

GeriPal

FEBRUARY 15, 2024

The insight started when Carmen, an orthopedic surgeon-researcher, and Katie, a physical therapist- researcher participated in ride-alongs with EMS providers to patient’s homes. Going into patient’s homes was eye opening. Eric: Well, what are the odds that two family members focus on a similar topic and do research together?

Community 114

Community Transportation IT PCP 114

GeriPal

MAY 15, 2025

Prior podcasts on the ethics of nudging , and a different trial conducted by Kate and Scott in which the default for hospitalized seriously ill patients was to receive a palliative care consult. Many were community hospitals. The intervention was a negative study for the primary outcome, hospital length of stay.

Patient-Centered 116

Patient-Centered Hospital IT Illness 116

GeriPal

NOVEMBER 14, 2024

Patients may feel like falls are just part of normal aging. This is Sarah Berry, who is at the Hebrew Senior Life and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical center and Harvard Medical School. And the big things that we think about as far as complications, so there, obviously the thing that comes to everybody’s mind is like fractures.

IT 124

IT Screening Patient-Centered Community 124

GeriPal

JUNE 30, 2022

You have a patient with dementia severe enough that she cannot recognize relatives. Should she have an operation, and risk the pain, potential complications, and attendant delirium associated with the operation? Joel: The Brigham and Women’s Hospital likes me to say that too. And she was rushed to the hospital.

Patient-Centered 101

Patient-Centered Complication Patients IT 101

GeriPal

SEPTEMBER 7, 2023

Does it improve outcomes that patients, caregivers, and clinicians care about? hint: 80% can be done in advance by patients or caregivers) Why is it that some oncologists are resistant to conducting a geriatric assessment, yet have no problem ordering tests that cost thousands of dollars? Alex: How is your family doing?

Patient-Centered 129

Patient-Centered IT Patients Clinic 129

GeriPal

OCTOBER 26, 2023

Within hours of recording this podcast, I joined a family meeting of an older patient who had multiple medical problems including cancer, and a slow but inexorable decline in function, weight, and cognition. The patient’s capacity to make decisions was marginal, and his sons were shouldering much of the responsibility.

Patient-Centered 132

Patient-Centered Hospital Patients IT 132

GeriPal

JULY 28, 2022

Alex: And we are also delighted to welcome Areej El-Jawahri, who is an oncologist at Massachusetts General Hospital as well, who specializes in blood cancers. This is my early father’s day gift from the family. Welcome to the GeriPal podcast, Jennifer. Jennifer: Thanks. Welcome to the GeriPal Podcast, Areej. Eric: Yeah.

Illness 110

Illness Hospital Patient-Centered Patients 110

GeriPal

OCTOBER 12, 2023

Summary Transcript Summary For surgeons and patients, deciding if and when to operate can be challenging. Often, the way surgeons communicate about these decisions doesn’t make things any easier for themselves or their patients. We hope you enjoy this episode. I did it before and this guy, he was 85, but he was climbing Mount Everest.”

IT 128

IT Family Families Patient-Centered 128

GeriPal

NOVEMBER 21, 2024

We are going to tackle this question and so many more about coping on this week’s podcast with Dani Chammas , a recurring GeriPal guest, psychiatrist, and palliative care doc at UCSF, and Amanda Moment , a Palliative Care Social Worker at Brigham and Women’s Cancer Center. Coping is something that we see our patients do.

Illness 125

Illness IT Patient-Centered Patients 125

GeriPal

JUNE 9, 2022

Palliative care, in contrast, saw explosive growth in US hospitals. The National Palliative Care Research Center (NPCRC)and Palliative Care Research Cooperative (PCRC)were founded in part to meet this need. She’s also a member of the PAIR Center, which stands for Palliative Advanced Illness Research Center.

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Consulting Patient-Centered Diagnosis Referral 99

GeriPal

OCTOBER 19, 2023

Certainly SOME of those avoided hospitalizations, CPR, and ICU stays were due to documentation of those orders in the POLST. Caveat as well that RCTs should not be placed on pedestal as the only answer- often patients enrolled in RCTs do not represent real world patients – observational studies do. This is Eric Widera.

Patient-Centered 126

Patient-Centered IT Patients Illness 126

GeriPal

NOVEMBER 7, 2024

If the purpose of initiating dialysis is improving function – our complex, frail, older patients are likely to be disappointed. Are we seeing people like more older adults, more nursing home patients starting dialysis, and even at a higher gfr? Let it be (hint hint). So I wonder if I could turn to either of our nephrologists.

Management 116

Management Patient-Centered Patients IT 116

GeriPal

FEBRUARY 8, 2024

Hospital Chaplains, Spirituality, and Pain Management: A Qualitative Study. I think even the word patient, patient, I think, comes from the word suffer, the one who suffers. I’ve had a patient in one room, they have stage four breast cancer. Pain Manag Nurs. 2023 Dec 20:S1524-9042(23)00202-3. doi: 10.1016/j.pmn.2023.11.004.

IT 137

IT Family Families Physicals 137

GeriPal

AUGUST 11, 2022

Susan led the Project on Death in America’s Faculty Scholars program , used her dual training in internal medicine and psychiatry to shine a light on psychosocial aspects of palliative care, and founded the Department of Psychosocial Care at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. .

Illness 109

Illness IT Family Families 109

GeriPal

MARCH 28, 2024

And we have Kate Courtright, who’s at University of Pennsylvania, the PAIR Center. What we did was ask clinicians earlier in the ICU stay for very sick patients to document prognosis, and for those who they thought would survive, to document six-month functional prognosis. Kate: These are very sick patients. Kate: Sure.

Consulting 115

Consulting Patient-Centered IT Patients 115

GeriPal

APRIL 10, 2025

I asked emergency medicine clinicians what they thought when a patient who is seriously ill and DNR comes to the ED, and some responded, (paraphrasing), what are they doing here? Most emergency providers wanted to do the right thing for seriously ill patients, but they didnt have the knowledge, skills, or experience to do it.

Patient-Centered 77

Patient-Centered IT Hospital Patients 77

GeriPal

MARCH 24, 2022

Alex: We are delighted to welcome to the GeriPal podcast, Susan Hickman, who is professor at the Indiana University schools of nursing and medicine, and is director of the IU Center for Aging Research at the Regenstrief Institute. And especially for those who may have nontraditional families. Welcome to the GeriPal podcast Susan.

Illness 72

Illness IT Healthcare Patient-Centered 72

GeriPal

JUNE 15, 2023

Alex: And we have Matt DeCamp, who’s joining from the University of Colorado, where he is a primary care internist and bioethicist at the Center for Bioethics and Humanities. My worry though with that is that are we going to be expected to be more productive then, to see more patients? The patient is crying in front of you.

IT 99

IT Patient-Centered Patients Healthcare 99

GeriPal

JUNE 13, 2024

Accreditation In support of improving patient care, UCSF Office of CME is jointly accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME), the Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education (ACPE), and the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC), to provide continuing education for the healthcare team.

Illness 133

Illness Patient-Centered Patients IT 133

GeriPal

JANUARY 26, 2023

Ramona: Well, I’ve always been interested in health equity, always been interested in looking at disparities, and the disparities that I have looked at most often have been for patients at the end of their lives. The trainee said to me something like, “But I haven’t seen any geriatric patients yet.” Eric: Yes.

IT 91

IT Patient-Centered Healthcare Patients 91

GeriPal

FEBRUARY 13, 2025

How to be sensitive to the risks of stereotyping based on recommendations from the few members of the board to the many heterogeneous patients served? I’m Marie Bakitas, and I’m a professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and also the associate Director of the center for Palliative and Supportive Care.

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Consulting Community Patient-Centered Family 63

GeriPal

MARCH 3, 2022

A little over a decade ago, Ken Covinsky wrote a GeriPal post about a Jack Iwashyna JAMA study finding that older adults who survive sepsis are likely to develop new functional and cognitive deficits after they leave the hospital. Shunichi Nakagawa’s Tweet that went viral on responding a patient request to drink ice water before death.

Patient-Centered 96

Patient-Centered Patients IT Hospital 96

GeriPal

MAY 25, 2023

Others cited the call from communities to meet them where they are – be they senior centers, Black-owned businesses, or churches (we have a podcast planned in the fall with Fayron Epps and Karen Moss on the church setting). Complicated grief? Health care system drives where you end up, which hospital, which state you live in.

Community 95

Community IT Patient-Centered Primary Care 95

GeriPal

MARCH 30, 2023

Liz wrote a fabulous perspectives piece in the NEJM titled “ Deciding on My Dimples ” which talks about her experience as a patient doing shared decision making during neurosurgery for resection of an astrocytoma. But my piece in the New England Journal is about being a patient right before awake brain surgery.

IT 95

IT Patient-Centered Patients Healthcare 95

GeriPal

AUGUST 24, 2023

Harvey is probably best known for his work in developing dignity therapy, a psychological intervention designed specifically to address many of the psychological, existential, and spiritual challenges that patients and their families face as death approaches. Had multiple physical, psychological complications as a result of that.

Patient-Centered 98

Patient-Centered Patients IT Illness 98

GeriPal

NOVEMBER 17, 2022

staff training in person centered care). The songs about how saving lives is actually a pretty complicated business. I mean, people who used to be in hospitals are now with quicker DRGs. And that’s the complication here is there’s so many things that the staff can be trained on. Alex: Yeah. Eric: Nice.

Community 97

Community IT Mental Health Medical 97

GeriPal

MAY 29, 2025

Today we talk about lucid episodes and what they might mean to the person with dementia, their family and loved ones, to philosophers, to clinicians, to neuroscientists. Andrew complicates this definition , stating it raises more questions than answers. Particularly patients, families. That their loved one is in there.

Family 93

Family Families IT Patient-Centered 93

GeriPal

DECEMBER 19, 2024

A NY Times article titled Should Patients Be Allowed to Die From Anorexia ? This is a unique opportunity to join UCSFs vibrant and renowned faculty, teach and mentor future doctors, and make a lasting impact at one of the nations leading safety-net hospitals. We don’t have a way of operationalizing which patients qualify.

Illness 101

Illness Mental Health IT Patient-Centered 101

GeriPal

MAY 12, 2022

I mean, just such struggles around corruption in hospitals, access to opioid pain medication, and you almost had to wait until a friend of yours was in power, so you could have access, get permission. It was wonderful for me, as a rehab doctor, to be able to see patients with spinal cord injuries and how they were living in their homes.

Community 115

Community IT Relationship Healthcare 115

GeriPal

JANUARY 11, 2024

In further contrast to the United States, MAID in Canada is almost entirely administered by a clinician, whereas in the United States patients must self administer. Alex: And we’re delighted to welcome Sonu Gaind, who is a Chief of psychiatry and professor at the Sunnybrook Health Sciences Center at the University of Toronto.

Illness 144

Illness IT Medical Provider 144