A Case Report of Treatment-Resistant Agitation in Dementia With Lewy Bodies: Medical Marijuana as an Alternative to Antipsychotics.

Palliative care teams are often consulted to assist in treating persistent dementia-related behavioral issues. Delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) offers an alternative to traditional antipsychotic drugs in the long-term management of dementia with behavioral change. We present the case of an 85-year-old man with dementia with Lewy bodies with worsening aggression refractory to antipsychotic management. Multiple regimens of antipsychotics failed both in the outpatient and inpatient settings. After exhausting other options and in the setting of worsening agitation, a tincture of THC was prescribed. After starting THC tincture, the patient's behavior rapidly improved, and he was discharged home to the care of his spouse. The challenges of prescribing and obtaining THC are discussed.

Global Palliative Care Education in the Time of COVID-19.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has highlighted the need for health care providers skilled in rapid and flexible decision making, effective and anticipatory leadership, and in dealing with trauma and moral distress. Palliative care (PC) workers have been an essential part of the COVID-19 response in advising on goals of care, symptom management and difficult decision making, and in supporting distressed health care workers, patients, and families. We describe Global Palliative Education Collaborative (GPEC), a training partnership between Harvard, University of California San Francisco, and Tulane medical schools in the U.S.; and two international PC programs in Uganda and India. GPEC offers U.S.-based PC fellows participation in an international elective to learn about resource-limited PC provision, gain perspective on global challenges to caring for patients at the end of life, and cultivate resiliency. International PC colleagues have much to teach about practicing compassionate PC amidst resource constraints and humanitarian crisis. We also describe a novel educational project that our GPEC faculty and fellows are participating in-the Resilience Inspiration Storytelling Empathy Project-and discuss positive outcomes of the project.

A Case Report of COVID-19 in New Orleans, Louisiana: Highlighting the Complexities of Prognostication in a Critically Ill Patient.

Palliative care teams and intensive care teams have experience providing goals-of-care guidance for critically ill patients and families. Critical coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) infection is defined as infection requiring intensive care unit care, respiratory support, and often multiorgan involvement. This case presents a 53-year-old critically ill COVID-19 patient in multisystem organ failure who appeared hours from death despite best medical efforts. Comfort-focused care and compassionate extubation were offered after all medical teams felt near certain that death was imminent. Overnight, while options were being considered by the family, the patient began to markedly improve hemodynamically and was extubated several days later. Weeks later, the patient survived the hospital stay and was discharged to rehabilitation. After rehabilitation he returned home, able to walk, communicate freely, and independently perform all activities of daily living. Dialysis was no longer necessary and was stopped. The challenges of assisting in goals-of-care conversations for patients with serious COVID-19 infection are discussed.

Standardized Attending Rounds to Improve the Patient Experience: A Pragmatic Cluster Randomized Controlled Trial.

BACKGROUND: At academic medical centers, attending rounds (AR) serve to coordinate patient care and educate trainees, yet variably involve patients. OBJECTIVE: To determine the impact of standardized bedside AR on patient satisfaction with rounds. DESIGN: Cluster randomized controlled trial. SETTING: 500-bed urban, quaternary care hospital. PATIENTS: 1200 patients admitted to the medicine service. INTERVENTION: Teams in the intervention arm received training to adhere to 5 AR practices: 1) pre-rounds huddle; 2) bedside rounds; 3) nurse integration; 4) real-time order entry; 5) whiteboard updates. Control arm teams continued usual rounding practices. MEASUREMENTS: Trained observers audited rounds to assess adherence to recommended AR practices and surveyed patients following AR. The primary outcome was patient satisfaction with AR. Secondary outcomes were perceived and actual AR duration, and attending and trainee satisfaction. RESULTS: We observed 241 (70.1%) and 264 (76.7%) AR in the intervention and control arms, respectively, which included 1855 and 1903 patient rounding encounters. Using a 5-point Likert scale, patients in the intervention arm reported increased satisfaction with AR (4.49 vs 4.25; P = 0.01) and felt more cared for by their medicine team (4.54 vs 4.36; P = 0.03). Although the intervention shortened the duration of AR by 8 minutes on average (143 vs 151 minutes; P = 0.052), trainees perceived intervention AR as lasting longer and reported lower satisfaction with intervention AR. CONCLUSIONS: Medicine teams can adopt a standardized, patient-centered, time-saving rounding model that leads to increased patient satisfaction with AR and the perception that patients are more cared for by their medicine team. Journal of Hospital Medicine 2017;12:143-149.

Ethics Simulation in Global Health Training (ESIGHT).

INTRODUCTION: Many health care trainees and providers have reported feeling unprepared for the ethical dilemmas they faced while practicing in global health. Simulation is an effective teaching modality in the training of health care professionals. This resource describes the development, implementation, and assessment of an innovative simulation training program for global health ethics. METHODS: We conducted simulation training with trainees and professionals from various health care disciplines. After a didactic component in which general ethical principles were introduced, participants acted as either lead or observer in four simulations representing different ethical challenges. Participants interacted with simulated patients within a set designed to resemble a resource-constrained environment. Data on the participants' experiences and evaluations of the program's effectiveness were collected through pre-/postsession surveys and focus groups. RESULTS: All 53 participants (100%) agreed that the simulations "effectively highlighted ethical dilemmas I could face abroad," and 98% agreed that the content "was useful in my preparation for an international elective." Responses from surveys and focus groups stressed the importance of the realistic and emotional nature of the simulation in increasing confidence and preparedness, as well as a preference for simulation as the modality for teaching global health ethics. DISCUSSION: Simulation for global health ethics training can help to raise awareness of the complex ethical challenges one may face abroad. Incorporating simulation training within broader global health curricula can improve trainee preparedness and confidence in appropriately and effectively identifying, strategizing, and navigating through ethical dilemmas in the field.

What Are the Ethical Issues Facing Global-Health Trainees Working Overseas? A Multi-Professional Qualitative Study.

The aim of this study was to identify global health ethical issues that health professional trainees may encounter during electives or placements in resource-limited countries. We conducted a qualitative study involving focus groups and an interview at the University of California San Francisco. Participants were multi-professional from the Schools of Medicine, Nursing and Pharmacy and had experience working, or teaching, as providers in resource-limited countries. Eighteen participants provided examples of ethical dilemmas associated with global-health outreach work. Ethical dilemmas fell into four major themes relating to (1) cultural differences (informed consent, truth-telling, autonomy); (2) professional issues (power dynamics, training of local staff, corruption); (3) limited resources (scope of practice, material shortages); (4) personal moral development (dealing with moral distress, establishing a moral compass, humility and self awareness). Three themes (cultural differences, professional issues, limited resources) were grouped under the core category of "external environmental and/or situational issues" that trainees are confronted when overseas. The fourth theme, moral development, refers to the development of a moral compass and the exercise of humility and self-awareness. The study has identified case vignettes that can be used for curriculum content for global-health ethics training.

Improving attending rounds: Qualitative reflections from multidisciplinary providers.

BACKGROUND: Attending rounds, the time for the attending physician and the team to discuss the team's patients, take place at teaching hospitals every day, often with little standardization. OBJECTIVE: This hypothesis-generating qualitative study sought to solicit improvement recommendations for standardizing attending rounds from the perspective of a multi-disciplinary group of providers. METHODS: Attending physicians, housestaff (residents and interns), medical students, nurses and pharmacists at an academic medical center participated in a quality improvement initiative between January and April 2013. Participants completed an individual or focus group interview or an e-mail survey with three open-ended questions: (1) What are poor or ineffective practices for attending rounds? (2) How would you change attending rounds structure and function? (3) What do you consider best practices for attending rounds? We undertook content analysis to summarize each clinical stakeholder group's improvement recommendations. RESULTS: Sixty stakeholders participated in our study including 23 attending hospitalists, 24 housestaff, 7 medical students, 2 pharmacists and 4 nurses. Key improvement recommendations included (1) performing a pre-rounds huddle, (2) planning of the visit schedule based on illness or pending discharge, (3) real-time order writing, (4) patient involvement in rounds with shared decision-making, (5) bedside nurse inclusion and (6) minimizing interruption of intern or student presentations. CONCLUSIONS: The practice improvement recommendations identified in this study will require deliberate systems changes and training to implement, and they warrant rigorous evaluation to determine their impact on the clinical and educational goals of rounds.

Teaching corner: "first do no harm": teaching global health ethics to medical trainees through experiential learning.

Recent studies show that returning global health trainees often report having felt inadequately prepared to deal with ethical dilemmas they encountered during outreach clinical work. While global health training guidelines emphasize the importance of developing ethical and cultural competencies before embarking on fieldwork, their practical implementation is often lacking and consists mainly of recommendations regarding professional behavior and discussions of case studies. Evidence suggests that one of the most effective ways to teach certain skills in global health, including ethical and cultural competencies, is through service learning. This approach combines community service with experiential learning. Unfortunately, this approach to global health ethics training is often unattainable due to a lack of supervision and resources available at host locations. This often means that trainees enter global health initiatives unprepared to deal with ethical dilemmas, which has the potential for adverse consequences for patients and host institutions, thus contributing to growing concerns about exploitation and "medical tourism." From an educational perspective, exposure alone to such ethical dilemmas does not contribute to learning, due to lack of proper guidance. We propose that the tension between the benefits of service learning on the one hand and the respect for patients' rights and well-being on the other could be resolved by the application of a simulation-based approach to global health ethics education.

Alcohol withdrawal.

Alcohol withdrawal is a common clinical condition that has a variety of complications and morbidities. The manifestations can range from mild agitation to withdrawal seizures and delirium tremens. The treatments for alcohol withdrawal include benzodiazepines, anticonvulsants, beta-blockers and antihypertensives. Although benzodiazepines are presently a first-line therapy, there is controversy regarding the efficacies of these medications compared with others. Treatment protocols often involve one of two contrasting approaches: symptom-triggered versus fixed-schedule dosing of benzodiazepines. We describe these protocols in our review and examine the data supporting symptom-triggered dosing as the preferred method for most patients in withdrawal.The Clinical Institute Withdrawal Assessment for Alcohol scoring system for alcohol withdrawal streamlines care, optimizes patient management, and is the best scale available for withdrawal assessment. Quality improvement implications for inpatient management of alcohol withdrawal include increasing training for signs of withdrawal and symptom recognition, adding new hospital protocols to employee curricula, and ensuring manageable patient-to-physician and patient-to-nurse ratios.