Dr. Ira Byock: National Leader in Palliative Care

05/04/20 • 48 min

#009 - Join host Dr. Red Hoffman as she interviews Dr. Ira Byock, nationally known author and speaker and the founder and chief medical officer of the Institute for Human Caring at Providence St. Joseph in Southern California. Ira served as the president of the American Association of Hospice and Palliative Medicine as well as the Director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Promoting Excellence in End of Life Care, under which the Surgeons Palliative Care task force (now the Committee on Surgical Palliative Care) was created within the American College of Surgeons. For those interested in the history of surgical palliative care, Ira is also known as the man who introduced surgeons Dr. Robert Milch to Dr. Geoffrey Dunn (both men went on to become leaders in the field of surgical palliative care). Ira shares that seeing how poorly patients at the end of life were treated in his training hospital led him to develop a hospice program while still a resident physician. He discusses that illness is fundamentally a personal issue (rather than a medical issue) and that by acknowledging this, surgeons can do their part in making certain that patients get the best care possible. He is thoughtful, inspiring, generous with both his time and his experience, and a pure joy to talk to!
Learn more about Ira here.
Ira's books include:
The Best Care Possible: A Physician's Quest to Transform Care Through the End of Life
Dying Well: Peace and Possibilities at the End of Life
The Four Things that Matter Most
Learn more about the Surgeons Palliative Care Workgroup here (includes PDFs of over two dozen articles written about surgical palliative care and published in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons.)
To learn more about the surgical palliative care community, visit us on twitter @surgpallcare

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Dr. Sharmila Dissanaike: Wellness and Ethics in Surgery

#008 - Join host Dr. Red Hoffman and co-host Dr. Mackenzie Cook as they interview Dr. Sharmila Dissanaike, professor and Peter C. Canizaro chair of surgery at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center. They have a wide-ranging discussion about leadership, wellness, disaster ethics and the role of social media in academic medicine. Sharmila shares some of her journey to becoming a chair of surgery, discusses the importance of maintaining a growth mindset and emphasizes the need for all of us to maintain an interest in the nuance of our current situation, rather than on searching for black and white answers. Once again, we also talk about the benefit of being a "spork" (neither a spoon nor a fork!). Join us for a great conversation!
Resources discussed in the episode:
Ethical Framework for the Allocation of Resources in the Event of Shortages by the American College of Surgeons Committee on Ethics
Ethics of PPE Allocation by the American College of Surgeons Committee on Ethics
ACS-MacLean Center Surgical Ethics Fellowship
To learn more about the surgical palliative care community, visit us on twitter @surgpallcare.

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Special Edition: Joint Episode with the GeriPal Podcast!

#010 - Join host Dr. Red Hoffman as she joins the long-running GeriPal Podcast to discuss all things surgical palliative care. As is the tradition on the GeriPal podcast, Red gets serenaded by GeriPal co-hosts Drs. Eric Widera and Alex Smith, along with guest co-host Dr. Joe Lin. They then go on to chat about the definition of surgical palliative care, the importance of building relationships between surgeons and palliative care providers and the common misconceptions that both disciplines have about each other. They review a recent retrospective study of the utilization of palliative care in VA patients undergoing high-risk surgical patients and brainstorm various ways that palliative care may be better integrated into the world of surgery.
If you've never listened to the GeriPal Podcast, you are guaranteed to love these guys!
Paper discussed:
Palliative care and end-of-life outcomes following high-risk surgery
To learn more about the GeriPal Podcast, check out their blog here or subscribe to their podcast here.
To learn more about the surgical palliative care community, visit us on twitter @surgpallcare

The Surgical Palliative Care Podcast - Dr. Ira Byock: National Leader in Palliative Care

Transcript

spk_0: 0:13
surgical Palliative care may seem counterintuitive, but surgeons have a rich history of pallid both their patients and their families. I am Red Hoffman in Acute Care surgeon in Asheville, North Carolina, and one of 79 surgeons currently board certified in hospice and palliative medicine. Join me as I interviewed the founders and the leaders, the Surgical Palliative Care Movement, a diverse group of surgeons dedicated to providing a high quality palliative medic