Frankie, 29 July 2010
A new elearning session focusing on the General Medical Council’s (GMC) new guidance on treatment and care towards the end of life is now available to all doctors via e-ELCA, End of Life Care for All. The session, Treatment and care towards the end of life: good practice in decision making, explains the key principles in the guidance and helps doctors to apply the principles in the guidance to some of the common challenges that arise when caring for patients towards the end of life.
e-ELCA is a free and innovative elearning resource that aims to enhance the training and education of those involved in delivering end of life care. Commissioned by the Department of Health (DH) to support the National End of Life Care Strategy (2008), e-ELCA has been developed by the Association for Palliative Medicine of Great Britain and Ireland in partnership with elfh.
The GMC session explores the fictional case studies of two patients with different conditions and allows the users to work through the decision making process alongside the doctor, the patient and those close to them. The case studies cover both managing a patient’s request for treatment and a patient’s advance refusal of treatment, and give doctors guidance about areas of practice including clinically assisted nutrition and hydration and cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR).
Interactive exercises and multiple choice questions are included to test the learners’ knowledge and animation and imagery help create a visually engaging experience. Opportunities for personal reflection are provided throughout.
e-ELCA is broken down into four core areas (advance care planning, assessment, communication skills and symptom management). Each area consists of a number of elearning sessions which are intuitive and easy to use. Each session takes around 20 minutes to complete to fit in with busy working lives. The session on the GMC guidance is included in the fifth area, Integrated Learning, which aims to integrate learning from the other areas through the use of case studies.
Bee Wee, National Clinical Lead for e-ELCA said: “e-ELCA is a groundbreaking elearning resource designed to ensure that well informed high quality end of life care can be delivered by confident and competent health and social care professionals wherever the person happens to be. We would like to thank the GMC for their support in the development of this new session and in helping us to ensure that e-ELCA comprehensively covers all aspects and issues surrounding end of life care.”
Jane O’Brien, Assistant Director, Standards at the GMC, said: “The GMC has for the first time provided guidance for doctors on some of the most challenging issues when treating patients towards the end of life, including advance care planning, how to respond to a patient’s advance request for treatment and a doctors’ responsibilities after a patient has died. These were all issues around which doctors and patients asked the GMC for further guidance. We are delighted to have been able to work with e-ELCA to create an easy to use elearning session that explains the guidance in a straightforward and interactive way. The new e-ELCA session will help doctors to support patients and their families to make emotional and difficult decisions about the care they would like towards the end of life.”
Doctors wishing to access this session and benefit from e-ELCA as a whole can register for free at https://www.e-lfh.org.uk/programmes/end-of-life-care.
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