For Ami Doshi, MD, FAAP, a hospitalist at Rady Children’s Hospital San Diego, the path to establishing a comprehensive pediatric palliative care program began with her realization during medical training that doctors didn’t always adequately address the suffering of young patients with advanced disease and their families. Then, in a hospice rotation, she saw that the palliative approach could offer a better way.
During a pediatric hospital medicine fellowship at the University of California at San Diego, Dr. Doshi conducted an educational needs assessment and then created a palliative care curriculum for residents. Rady administrators supported her attending the Palliative Care Leadership Center training at UC San Francisco, with a team from Rady and Harvard Medical School’s program in Palliative Care Education and Practice.
After five years of development, the program Dr. Doshi helped to launch at Rady has grown into a division of palliative medicine, with a medical director, an inpatient consultation service, a palliative home care program coordinated by a health navigator, and a variety of models in the outpatient clinics.
“The goal is to be seamless and to treat patients across the continuum of care,” says Dr. Doshi, who is now board certified in hospice and palliative. Although she is based in the division of hospital medicine, she leads sit-down rounds with the full palliative care team and bioethics consultants every other week.
“Finding time for this work is always a challenge,” she says, adding that administrative support for physicians’ protected time is growing and that the program is ramping up its data collection to document outcomes resulting from palliative care.
For more information on the program, email her at [email protected].
Larry Beresford is a freelance writer in Alameda, Calif.