Hospice Foundation of America
E-Newsletter
Volume 6, Issue 9
September 2006
http://www.hospicefoundation.org

We are pleased to return to the e-newsletter after a month’s respite, and to turn our focus to our 14th Annual National Bereavement Teleconference, Living With Grief^®: Before and After the Death. We hope your summer was a good one.

At HFA we have long recognized the value of expressive arts in understanding complicated and powerful emotions. One area that reflects this value is in the selection of the image for our teleconference companion books. Internal debates over the final choice each year are generally pretty lively, to put it one way. But we had no debate when our Vice President of Programs suggested that we consider art from individual hospice programs for a cover. We hope that all hospice and other grief programs with art therapy modules will consider submitting samples for publication. See What’s New @HFA for details.

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Focus on: Interview with Robin Fiorelli, VITAS Healthcare Corporation

As we focus on the upcoming teleconference, we plan to speak with many of you who work directly in the field of grief and bereavement every day. Creating this dialogue will help us in our planning process, and as we use this e-newsletter to share information it may benefit your work as well.

We begin our conversations with Robin Fiorelli, Senior Director of Bereavement and Volunteer Services for VITAS Healthcare Corporation. We spoke with Ms. Fiorelli about the changes that she has seen in the field during her long career, the implications that these changes have had in practice, and some of the creative programs that she has developed to support both families and staff in this important and difficult journey. Read the interview here.

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HFA’s 14th Annual National Bereavement Teleconference, Living With Grief^®: Before and After the Death

HFA’s 14th annual National Bereavement Teleconference, Living With Grief^®: Before and After the Death, will be broadcast Thursday, March 22, 2007 from 1:30--4:00pm. This teleconference, as well as the accompanying book, will explore the most current theoretical perspectives on loss and grief as experienced by persons throughout a life-limiting illness and by survivors after the death. A particular focus will be paid to areas where understandings of grief have been challenged. The program will be useful to a range of professionals who counsel persons who are bereaved including psychologists, counselors, clergy, social workers, nurses, case managers and other health care workers, and funeral directors, as well as educators, teachers and school-based personnel. The information will also be helpful to individuals who offer education on loss, grief, dying or death.

Frank Sesno, an Emmy-award winning journalist, special correspondent with CNN and a faculty member George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs, will moderate the program, which features panelists:
• Scott W. Bradley, MSW, CT, CFSP
• Kenneth J. Doka, PhD, MDiv
• Lorraine Hedtke, MSW, ACSW, LCSW
• Patricia Murphy, PhD, APN, FAAN
• Robert A. Neimeyer, PhD
• Robert Washington, PhD, MDiv

The panel will examine and discuss the following topics:
• Anticipatory grief and anticipatory mourning: approaches that professional caregivers can use to assist patients and families struggling with loss in life-threatening illness;
• Strategies and interventions that professional caregivers can use at the moment of death and in funeral rituals to help survivors cope with loss;
• Ways that our understandings of grief have changed over the last 20 years and how changes have influenced practice;
• Research on the effectiveness of grief interventions;
• The current debate over a new DSM diagnostic category for complicated grief; and
• Current research and theory on grief reactions of professional caregivers, and ways that individuals and organizations can effectively support grieving staff and volunteers.

We encourage you to be a Site Coordinator for this important program. Registration opens Wednesday, October 4, 2006; see the Site Coordinator’s Corner below for more information.

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 What’s New @HFA

Many HFA readers have commented on the attractive covers of HFA’s teleconference companion books. We have used original graphics, images from 9-11, a sculpture by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and a painting by Picasso. For the 2007 companion book we are seeking to utilize artwork from those involved in grief work, whether as patients, therapists or survivors. The winning entry will be displayed on 20,000 book covers and during the teleconference program. Click here for details.

Is your hospice listed in the newest online hospice directory, www.hospicedirectory.org? Hundreds of hospices have taken advantage of free registration and are now listed in HospiceDirectory.org, the only comprehensive listing of all hospices in North America. Register your hospice by September 29, 2006, and you can receive either a free copy of our award-winning Living With Grief^® teleconference companion book Caregiving and Loss, or 50 copies of one Special Issues Journeys. This is our way of saying thanks for the great work you do and thank you for joining HospiceDirectory.org. For more information on free registration and membership, contact hdadmin@hospicefoundation.org or call toll free: 1-800-868-5171.

Order Journeys Holiday issue at a discount! The holidays are fast approaching, and HFA's Journeys Holiday issue can help. Filled with compassionate articles written by experts about surviving the holidays while grieving, the Journeys Holiday issue can be ordered in bulk quantities online through the HFA website, or download an order form here that can be faxed or mailed to HFA's office.

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News from the Hospice World
The EDELE website is an on-line, searchable catalog of links to hundreds of web pages providing public data about demographics for people who died and their families and the experience of end-of-life care. EDELE now offers links to cause of death data by age, race, gender and county for all states. The website also offers visitors the opportunity to personalize the site based on preferences for data on certain topics or states. Users can search for data by topic, state, keyword, or an advanced search that finds data meeting several different criteria. Each search returns a list of web pages where relevant data can be found and a hot link to each page plus detailed information about the type of data the user will find at the linked site. For more information, visit www.edeledata.org. EDELE is a project of The Carolinas Center for Hospice and End of Life Care and The National Hospice and Palliative Care Association (NHPCO) with funding from the US Agency on Aging.

Hospice Foundation of America congratulates Hospice Minnesota on being a finalist for the International Health and Medical Media Award (known as the FREDDIE award). Their entry “Living With Hospice” has been nominated in the Coping category; winners will be announced later this month. HFA was honored to receive a FREDDIE last year for Living With Grief^®: Alzheimer’s Disease.

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Hospice Internationally

World Hospice and Palliative Care Day is a unified day of action to celebrate and support hospice and palliative care around the world. Now in its second year, World Hospice and Palliative Care Day 2006 takes place on October 7th. The theme for World Hospice and Palliative Care Day 2006 is Access to care for all – highlighting the fact that everyone has a right to high quality end-of-life care but that more needs to be done to enable everyone to access it.

Worldwide Hospice and Palliative Care Online (WHPCO) is a signposting tool that aims to help bridge the information gap for people in developing countries with limited resources and for anyone who wants to feel a part of the worldwide hospice and palliative care community. It is currently circulated to over 2,000 people in around 115 countries. Worldwide Hospice and Palliative Care Online is published bi-monthly by Hospice Information in collaboration with the UK forum for hospice and palliative care worldwide.

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Upcoming Conferences and Educational Opportunities

A Family Systems Perspective on Grief and Mourning, an online course with faculty Elliott Rosen, Ph.D., will run September 18 – October 13, 2006. The course is offered by the National Center for Death Education, Mount Ida College, in collaboration with the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization. See here for more information on this course and other online courses,  or call NCDE at 617-928-4649.

The 16th International Congress on Care of the Terminally Ill will take place September 26-29 at the Palais des Congrès in Montréal, Canada. Founded by Dr. Balfour Mount in 1976 and presented by the Palliative Care Division of the Departments of Oncology and Medicine of McGill University, this biennial Congress has grown to become one of the premier international events in palliative care and is widely recognized for its academic quality. Bringing together approximately 1200 participants from all over the world, the event provides an opportunity to review and share the latest developments in research as well as perspectives on end-of-life care from different cultures, spiritual traditions, and professions. The four-day program, developed by a McGill University Health Centre based scientific committee, includes plenaries by leaders in the field and over 75 workshops. For more information, please visit the website or call 514-481-7408, ext. 227.

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Site Coordinator’s Corner

Registration opens Wednesday, October 4, 2006, for HFA’s 14th annual National Bereavement Teleconference, Living With Grief^®: Before and After the Death, which will be broadcast Thursday, March 22, 2007 from 1:30--4:00pm. The registration form will be available on our website This year, for the first time in our teleconference history, you can register and pay online with a credit card, or you may download the application and mail it to us with a check, money order, or credit card to our Washington, DC address.

The fee to register is $25 per downlink site if registered before or on December 20, and $50 if registered after December 20. As an added bonus, you may also purchase a copy of the Living With Grief^®: Before and After the Death full length DVD at a $10 savings! The DVD will be mailed to you approximately three weeks after the program airs. The cost of registration, with the DVD, is $40 before or on December 20, and $65 after December 20.

After we receive your registration and payment, you will receive a detailed Site Coordinator’s Manual in the mail and a password to access teleconference materials on our website. Early next year, you will also receive a copy of the teleconference companion book. Please contact us with any questions at 800-854-3402 or via e-mail at telecon@hospicefoundation.org.

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