Monday April 2nd saw the first weekly #hpmglobal tweetchat. The world of social media is having an impact of various degrees on the way we interact and communicate.

As Twitter expanded, users created opportunities to bring together the growing community around a subject (#hashtag) to have ‘live’ discussions for a period of time. @ctsinclair and @rfberry started the #hpm (hospice and palliative medicine) Tweetchat that occurs most Wednesday nights in the USA. This has been a great opportunity for the hospice and palliative medicine community to get together under the direction of a moderator and discuss important articles and issues in real-time. However, due to the timing of this chat, it has been largely North American-based. Creating a further chat at an early morning time in the US, has opened up the opportunity to engage the world over.

So now, every Monday at 1pm GMT you can join other hospice and palliative medicine professionals in #hpmglobal tweetchat.
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Dr Kate Granger (an Elderly Medicine Registrar at Pinderfields hospital in Yorkshire) wrote this book whilst undergoing treatment for a rare, aggressive type of sarcoma. The book is available from www.theothersidestory.co.uk and a Kindle edition can be purchased from Amazon.
Synopsis - "A true story of one doctor's journey as a patient coming to terms with a terminal cancer diagnosis. The hope is that healthcare professionals will read it, in particular young doctors and medical students, and understand exactly what being a patient is really like and how their behaviours, no matter how small can impact massively on their patients. It is also a story of personal battles with control and learning how and when to relinquish it."
All profits from the sale of the book are being donated to the Yorkshire Cancer Centre.

Deciding Right has been published online. Deciding right is a north east wide initiative - the first in the UK - to integrate the principles of making advance care decisions for all ages. It brings together advance care planning, the Mental Capacity Act, cardiopulmonary resuscitation decisions and emergency healthcare plans.

Deciding Right website

The Department of Health has published its End of Life Care Strategy: Third Annual Report. The End of Life Care Strategy was published in July 2008, and this is the third annual report on progress in delivering the strategy.

Download the report.

In July 2008 the Department of Health published the End of Life Care Strategy - promoting high quality care for all adults at the end of life. This second annual report sets out the continuing progress in implementing the strategy, highlights the need for further work and identifies the action intended for this coming year. See report at DoH website

New GMC guidance for doctors, Treatment and care towards the end of life: good practice in decision making, has been published and comes into effect on 1 July 2010. This guidance replaces the booklet Withholding and withdrawing life-prolonging treatments (2002). It expands on the guidance in Consent, patients and doctors making decisions together, which sets out the principles on which good clinical decisions should be based, and provides a framework for good practice when providing treatment and care for patients who are reaching the end of their lives.
Download here or visit the GMC web page.

The Department of Health have published Improving the process of death certification in England and Wales: overview of programme. It provides a general overview of the Death Certification Programme and an update on current progress.

e-ELCA (End of Life Care for All) is one of the key elements in a programme to improve the skills of up to 2.5 million people working with dying people and their families – a key recommendation of the End of Life Care Strategy published in 2008.

The programme was launched in London on 21 January with around 60 highly-interactive learning sessions complete and soon to be available across large parts of the health and social care workforce. Each session lasts around 20 minutes and includes features such as self-assessment tools, audio/video clips and case studies.

For more information see the e-ELCA News Release.

An NCEPOD report - Deaths in Acute Hospitals: Caring to the End? - has been published today. This NCEPOD report highlights the process of care of patients who died in acute hospitals within four days of admission. It takes a critical look at areas where the care of patients might have been improved. Remediable factors have been identified in the clinical and the organisational care of these patients. See NCEPOD report.