Session 2 - The Web of Care

This week was about meeting different members in the care team and focusing on the patient perspective in the web of care. We also had Bradfield Dumpleton with us, Bradfield cartooned the session in live time - which was really interesting and added another dimension to our learning.

It was great hearing from Anita Oakley who is a Calvary social worker and one of our 2 Cancer Care Coordinators. We learnt from Anita the importance of interdisciplinary team in the web of care and how critical it is to have effective communication between the care providers and the patient and family. 

We were privileged this week to meet Dr Carmen Halton who is a Palliative Care Specialist who works in homes, hospitals and wherever she is needed to care for her patients. Dr Carmen fleshed out the meaning of Palliative Care for the group and highlighted some of the recent changes in health care in this field.

Dr Carmen outlined her personal experiences  and thinking around what  good care for people at the end of life looks like. She shared an interesting observation, she noted that for many people in medicine and society death is seen as a failure which can make our ability to deal with death very challenging. How many times do we see people revived and brought back to life in tv programs? Grays Anatomy and the like don't do many stories on  "good" deaths.

The girls learnt in question time that the youngest patient of Dr Carmen's was 3 days old and her oldest was over 100. Dr Carmen spoke about how even people who are over 100 can have difficulty thinking  and talking about approaching and reaching the end of their life. In her experience people often are afraid of "the way they are going to die" and not so much death itself. In this health care space our focus is to educate and care for people so they have less fear and are better equipped to deal with what they are going through and can enjoy their life. Dr Carmen said that one of the hardest questions for many people to ask is "How much time Doc?". 

Dr Carmen helped us understand  the concept of goals of care and how important it is to support patients and their families to think and talk about what their goals are.  At Calvary we are committed to support our patients make meaningful goals so that we can focus our care on helping them work towards these goals. These goals could be about being well enough to attend a family wedding, to have as little pain as possible or to heal a relationship that has broken down in their life.  We learnt this week that effective communication skills for health care workers is critical. 

After our education session we went down to the Unit and went through  2 activities. Anita lead an interactive role play with Nurse Kym. Students experimented with what it feels like to be a patient, lying in a patient bed, with a gown on and a head turban. This experience was about trying to think - what would it be like to be a patient? We explored the concept of powerlessness and patient centred care. The girls enjoyed this and were able to play around with some of the concepts we had been talking about. 

The second activity was about reflecting on our journey so far and allowing space for a response. We shared some of our personal reflections to I  hope.... and I wonder..... and also shared with our group how we were thinking and feeling about the program. It was a real privilege to listen to the students and to share some of what is going on for them.


I am looking forward to meeting more people in the web of care next week.