Need to fulfill your Continuing Legal Education (CLE) requirements? Creighton University School of Law provides numerous seminars throughout the academic year. Your next CLE opportunity is:
49 Years of Constitutional Law from a Teacher and Practitioner
Featuring Professor G. Michael Fenner, the James L. Koley ‘54 Professor of Constitutional Law
Friday, Sept. 14, 2018
10 - 11 a.m.
Free to Creighton School of Law alumni
Creighton University - Harper Center - Room 3028
602 N 20th St
Omaha, NE 68178
United States
Removing Obstacles to a Peaceful Death by Revising Health Professional Training and Payment Systems
Featuring Kathy Cerminara, Professor of Law, Shepard Broad College of Law
We all will die, but the American health care system often impedes a peaceful death. Instead of a quiet death at home surrounded by loved ones, many of us suffer through overutilization of sometimes-toxic therapeutic interventions long past the time when those interventions do more good than harm. Revisions to health professional training and payment policy are needed to reduce physical and existential suffering during the terminal phase of illness.
The solution lies in seamless progression from treatment with integrated palliative care to hospice before death, but provider attitudes and payor practices must change for that to occur. Thus, the following proposals are examined: increased training in communicating truthfully about prognosis and prospective benefit of therapies; further adoption of interprofessional practice, which would familiarize more professionals with the team-based approach characteristic of palliative care; and revision of payment mechanisms to incentivize high-quality care whether it is of low or high intensity.