The EPEC Project

Email: info@epec.net

EPEC-EM Announces Third Conference to be held in Chicago
The next ‘Become an EPEC-EM Trainer’ Conference will be held September 5 & 6, 2008 in Chicago, IL. Please visit this website again soon for more information on conference registration.

Education in Palliative and End-of-life Care for Emergency Medicine (EPEC-EM)
EPEC-EM is an extensive adaptation of the original EPEC curriculum, designed to teach the essential clinical competencies in emergency palliative care. This curriculum was written and edited by emergency physicians and nurse educators to address issues specific to emergency medicine practice. Linda Emanuel, MD, PhD is principle investigator, and Tammie Quest, MD is co-investigator and project director. This project is supported by the National Institutes of Health.

Educational topics include quick steps for performing a rapid palliative care assessment in the ED; formulating trajectories and prognoses; managing hospice patients, cancer patients, and chronic pain patients; steps for performing family-witnessed resuscitation; and much more. Emergency clinicians are taught how, when, and why to contact hospice or a primary provider; how to communicate bad news to patients and families; and how to assess patients for psychological, spiritual, and social needs. In addition, techniques for teaching palliative care to other emergency practitioners are covered.

EPEC-EM is a high impact, conference-based education dissemination project that utilizes the train the trainer model developed in the original EPEC Project. Conference participants are taught content about end-of-life and palliative care and are trained in teaching techniques and skills. These participants then return to their home institutions to teach what they learned to their colleagues and students. One goal of the EPEC-EM Project is to train directors of emergency medicine residency programs, so that future EM doctors will have exposure to the core principles of end-of-life and palliative care prior to seeing patients in need of these services. To date, the following emergency medicine residency programs have at least one EPEC-EM Trainer:
Los Angeles County-Harbor-UCLA Medical Center Program
Loma Linda University Program
Stanford University Hospital/Kaiser Permanente Medical Center Program
Denver Health Medical Center Program
George Washington University Program
Florida Hospital Medical Center Program
Emory University Program
McGaw Medical Center of Northwestern University Program
University of Illinois College of Medicine at Chicago Program
Advocate Christ Medical Center Program
Indiana University School of Medicine Program
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center/Harvard Medical School Program
Wayne State University/Detroit Medical Center Program
University of Michigan Program
St John Hospital and Medical Center Program
University of Mississippi Medical Center Program
University of Nebraska Medical Center Program
UMDNJ-New Jersey Medical School Program
University of New Mexico Program
University of Rochester Program
Duke University Hospital Program
Geisinger Health System Program
Thomas Jefferson University Program
Medical University of South Carolina Program
Vanderbilt University Program
Madigan Army Medical Center/University of Washington Program

The EPEC-EM Faculty comprises a diverse set of emergency department professionals. Physicians, nurses, lawyers, and chaplains with experience in emergency medicine and palliative care teach the workshop sessions.

Inaugural ‘Become an EPEC-EM Trainer’ Conference held in Chicago, IL
The EPEC-EM project trained its first set of trainers August 3 & 4, 2007 in Chicago. Over forty physicians, nurses, and social workers attended the two-day conference. This was the first palliative and end-of-life care education conference specifically geared to emergency department providers. Participants came from across the United States and Canada.

EPEC-EM Holds Second Conference in New Orleans
The second ‘Become an EPEC-EM Trainer’ Conference was held Februrary 27th &28th in New Orleans, LA. Through interactive lectures and small group sessions, participants were taught state-of-the-art principles about the practice of emergency palliative care. Upon completion of the conference, participants became certified EPEC-EM Trainers and were given various educational materials and media to use in disseminating the curriculum at their own institutions.