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REPORT SPECIAL SECTION: end of life |
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Residents go through hospice experience with patients
Residents are learning about death firsthand at a family practice residency in Iowa.
A rotation that includes hospice care has been required for every resident in the North Iowa Mercy Health Center family practice residency in Mason City for the past three years.
Program Director Michael Sparacino, D.O., set up the block rotation specifically to teach about end-of-life care.
He saw end-of-life care from a personal perspective a few years ago when his son's friend was diagnosed with brain cancer.
"I was informally their family physician," Sparacino said. "As he got sicker and sicker, I was enmeshed in this echelon of specialists and subspecialists along with them. As he progressed through diagnosis, treatment, the results of treatment and, finally, decline, he ended up back within family practice."
In Sparacino's program, residents go through the hospice experience with a patient. Residents become part of the decision-making team and are encouraged to stay with that patient through the process, even if the rotation ends before the patient dies. Residents also can choose to take a month working in the hospice program as an elective.
"They're eager to learn how to ease the pain and fear of death," Sparacino said. "Society is telling us that it wants all the new medical technology, but that it also wants physicians to be compassionate. We have to make death an easier process."
FP Report is published by the AAFP News Department. Copyright © 1998 by American Academy of Family Physicians.