Palliative Care
This year's Advanced Narrative Medicine Workshop is being offered in concert with our themed Basic Workshop. We have chosen Palliative Care for our themed workshop because it is the most narratively powerful of clinical practices today. Whether engaged in palliative care or not, this Advanced Workshop will provide a deep, rich examination of a real narrative clinical care as a background for extended training in Narrative Based principles and practice.
Palliative care has shown the courage and creativity to accompany patients through the sufferings of terminal illnesses. As a model of clinical practice attuned to the singular situations of each patient, family, and clinician, palliative care has achieved an ideal of narrative medicine: a care that embodies real presence, on-going personal investment, and radical listening to the stories of those living in the face of death--whenever and however far away that may be. Whether care is provided in in-patient acute care settings, ambulatory clinics, hospices, or patients' homes, narrative palliative care shows what dignified, respectful, humble care of the sick and the well should always be.
The workshop in Narrative Palliative Care welcomes guest faculty B.J. Miller and Craig Blinderman, two international pioneers in a narratively and creatively fortified palliative care to join the core faculty of Columbia's Narrative Medicine for a weekend of personal and professional exploration.
Narrative medicine's signature methods of close reading, writing for discovery, and visual and performative learning provide the workshop with intensive training in the creative dimensions of palliative care where trust and vision can grow. To expand the scope of our conversation, narratively trained clinicians will present their lessons in international palliative care, care management in home hospice, student and resident self-care within palliative care, and spiritual dimensions of narrative care at the end of life. Participants will deepen their understanding of the place of story-telling in the care of serious illness, both for patients' and family's support and for clinicians' existential well-being. We hope persons engaged in all clinical disciplines, palliative care, narrative medicine, patient advocates, and creative artists involved in health will join us.
The Advanced Workshop is designed to accommodate up to 24 participants, chosen to represent a range of prior experiences with narrative medicine.
