In November, Chair-Elect Susan Miller from Brown University gave an invited presentation at the ANTEA Worldwide Palliative Care Conference in Rome, Italy, which was held in collaboration with the European Association for Palliative Care.  The ANTEA association promotes access to high-quality palliative care and provides free home and hospice care to terminally ill patients; through its center, ANTEA Formad, it also develops palliative care training and research.  

Dr. Miller spoke within a session on Palliative Care in the Elderly and shared with the international audience information on how hospice care is provided in U.S. nursing homes, the proportion of nursing home residents with dementia who access hospice, and research on how the provision of hospice care to nursing home dementia residents is associated with hospital utilization and pain management.  The palliative care session was introduced by Prof. Ladislav Volicer, MD, from the University of South Florida and the Universita Karlova in the Czech Republic. Dr. Volicer presented research and best practices relating to care decisions for persons with end-stage dementia.  Another session speaker, Dr. Miel Ribbe from VU University in Amsterdam, shared information on the provision of palliative care to end-stage nursing home dementia residents in the Netherlands, where nursing home medicine is recognized as a medical specialty and where nursing homes employ physicians full-time.      

One goal of the ANTEA conference was to begin to work toward a common (internationally recognized) curriculum for palliative care training.  Three days of intensive work led to the production of three draft documents emphasising the essential elements needed to start implementing palliative care training from an international perspective. A common statement that emerged during the conference is that the terminally ill patient is a common experience in any part of the world, and those professionals who care for him/her and his/her family must have the same skills and competencies wherever the patient lives.