Understanding the Needs of the Dying: Bringing Hope, Comfort and Love to Life’s Final Chapter – David Kessler

Featuring David Kessler

Renowned End-of-Life Expert, Author Featured on “Dr. Oz”, “Oprah & Friends”, CNN, NBC, MSNBC, PBS, People Magazine, “Entertainment Tonight”, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times

David Kessler, best-selling author, collaborator with the legendary Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, and well-known expert on palliative care, hospice and end-of-life issues will provide you the newest information on death, grief and deathbed phenomena … real, tested, engaging information you will not find anywhere else.

Delve deeper into the mysteries of life and death exploring key topics

• New studies on deathbed visions, and the role they play in end-of-life care
• Tools for sensitivity and discretion for balancing wishes of the dying and family with medical, ethical and legal considerations
• Communication strategies for necessary difficult and emotion conversations
• Deeper insight on how anticipatory grief shapes end-of-life experiences
• Understand why children are often the forgotten grievers, and how to help
• Cultural differences and new sensitivity to care
• Assisted suicide

It’s guaranteed to be a seminar that will enhance your work as a caregiver and David will provide so much insight, tools, strategies and inspiring information, you’ll look forward to the next day at your work … so you can immediately begin to use all you have learned.

1. Identify common needs of the dying and ways to meet across many health care settings
2. Discover ways to discuss end of life issues while allowing miracles and hope
3. Identify the differences and commonalities of palliative and hospice care models
4. Define anticipatory grief and how it shapes the end of life experience for patients and families
5. Gain tools and techniques to manage our own reactions to loss in the workplace
6. Interpret and resolve conflict regarding advance directives and code status
7. Describe tools to help children cope with a love one dying
8. Identify common characteristics of deathbed visions and normalize them for families
9. Prepare techniques for running a successful family conference
10. Define how fears about pain addiction can play a role in family dynamics at the end of life
11. Outline the role of spirituality and its role in the last years of life

Signs of Impending Death

• Preparing family for physical changes
• Interventions for coping with emotional changes in the family
• Using near death awareness as a predictor in clinical settings

Palliative Care Model

• Academic settings vs community
• Physician led vs non physician led
• Roles of physician, nurse, social worker, case manager, discharge planner, clergy
• What’s best – hospital, home health, hospice, skilled nursing facility
• Joint commission certification

Hospice

• Removing barriers
• How hospice can increase length of stay while decreasing hospital time
• Bereavement services to enhance community partnerships

Death Related Sensory Experiences (Death Bed Visions)

• Effective and ineffective models for family coping and integration
• Religion in patients’ deathbed visions
• Using the law to normalize the dying experience
• Clinical/palliative care studies, research of near death awareness

Advance Directives

• Physician order for life-sustaining treatment
• Make advance directives useful and medically effective
• D.N.R. (do not resuscitate) vs. A.N.D. (allow natural death)
• Code status and impact on the grieving process

Anticipatory Grief

• Treatment strategies for hospice, palliative care and mental health care professionals
• Tools for normalizing

Helping the Dying Patient’s Children

• How the media shapes a child’s view of death
• Tools for preparing a child for loss
• Interventions for coping with funerals
• Why children are often the forgotten grievers and how to help

The Ethics Committee and End of Life

• How and when to use your ethics committee
• How and why members of the end of life team can participate
• Techniques for helping families get the most out of the ethics meetings
• Avoid the common pitfalls of ethics committees at the end of life

Hope and Miracles

• How to help families integrate desire for miracles at the end of life
• Techniques for honoring hope without fostering denial

Cultural Differences

• Affecting care of the dying
• Tools for successfully bridging the gap with healthcare providers and families

The Question of Assisted Suicide

• Understanding the current debate
• The realities of withdrawing care vs. assisted suicide
• Learn techniques for addressing patient’s requests for assisted suicide within the facilities and health care provider’s beliefs system