We want to hear from you!

Releasing Out-of-Hospital Premises Outcomes and Status
On December 20, 2012, a meeting of Council was held to approve the circulation of a proposed by-law permitting the College to post the results of inspections of out-of-hospital premises on the College website. The Out-of-Hospital Premises Inspection Program, established in 2010, inspected more than 250 premises in Ontario and graded each using the following scale: pass, pass with conditions, or fail.

This by-law was proposed in light of concern and continued questions about the adequacy and availability of information about premises inspection results. We believe that the implementation of this by-law amendment will, when passed, make the College’s Out-of Hospital Program the most transparent facility-based program in Canada.

We are actively seeking responses from the public and invite Noteworthy readers to participate.

For more information on this consultation, and to provide your feedback click here. 

All comments will be posted on our website. (Names, email addresses and other identifying information will not be included.) The deadline for this feedback is January 25, 2013.

End-of-Life Care

Last year, the College hosted a forum that brought together experts in the end-of-life care field. We asked them what needed to change to meaningfully improve the last months, weeks and days of patients’ lives.

The answer was simple: improve communication. The experts describe a current environment where assumptions and misunderstandings – between physician and patient, among specialists and within families – can replace informed discussion. Given this feedback, we’ve decided to launch a conversation. What is optimal care and what can be done to achieve it?

Getting an Education in Palliative Care, the first of a five-part series on end-of-life care in the College publication, Dialogue, explores education and professional development and raises questions as to whether physicians are receiving the palliative care education necessary to provide quality end-of-life care.

While not every patient ends up seeing a palliative care specialist, doctors in all fields see patients who can benefit from advance care planning and other palliative support. As one palliative care physician says, “It’s really about living as best as you can, as long as you can.”

An Ottawa psychiatrist who had three family members die within two weeks, shares her perspective. As she watched her loved ones struggle, she found it difficult to initiate much needed discussions with medical staff even though she’s a physician. She believes that all doctors – not just palliative care physicians – should learn how to confidently and competently broach sensitive issues with patients and their families.

Read Getting an Education in Palliative Care: available here

Join the Conversation
We’d like to hear from you. Should palliative care training be part of every medical student’s experience, regardless of discipline? Do you think physicians trained in end-of-life care provide more effective care for their patients overall?

Join the online discussion at www.cpso.on.ca/endoflife.

In the next Issue of Noteworthy, we will be looking at advance care planning. If you have put together an advance care plan for yourself or a family member, we'd like to learn about it. If you’ve chosen not to, we’d be just as interested in learning why not. Please contact us.

Prescribing Drugs

The College’s new Prescribing Drugs policy consolidates seven earlier policies and covers a variety of issues related to drugs and prescribing.

A draft version of the policy was posted on the College website with an open invitation asking for feedback. Patients, physicians and other stakeholders responded. Many comments addressed the need for a greater focus on the prevention of prescription drug abuse, while continuing to prescribe narcotics and controlled substances for legitimate reasons, including acute or chronic pain.  

The new Prescribing Drugs policy addresses these concerns by encouraging physicians to carefully consider whether prescribing narcotics is the most appropriate treatment for their patients. read it here