This intensive workshop is designed to explore and further develop the skills needed to successfully navigate today’s hospice environment. This intensive review will serve as part of your preparation for the Hospice Medical Director Certification Board (HMDCB) exam and is based on the exam blueprint.  The workshop also serves as a great orientation for those new to the hospice field or as a critical update for all hospice practitioners and managers.

Faculty will address:

• Responding to and managing the needs of patients and families receiving hospice care.
• Exhibiting knowledge of medical, psychosocial, and spiritual conditions encountered at end-of-life.
• Utilizing effective skills and strategies in all aspects of communication and leadership in hospice care.
• Applying best practices for professionalism, ethics, collaboration and life-long learning in hospice care.
• Overseeing the organizational, regulatory, and team components of systems-based practice.

Successfully leading positive change, particularly in the fields of palliative care and hospice, necessitates an awareness of your communication style, ability to build strong team connections, ability to foster strategic relationships, and an understanding of business concepts and perspectives. Leadership is also a journey that can feel lonely and frustrating, but with strong relationships and effective planning leaders can flourish.

Designed for emerging, early-stage, or experienced leaders across all settings (acute care, home, clinic, virtual), professions (administration, chaplaincy, medicine, nursing, pharmacy, social work etc.) and organization types (adult and pediatric acute care, hospice, outpatient, group practice, health plans, etc.).

This immersive session will include:

• Leadership and business planning concepts and frameworks (e.g. 4 types of behavioral styles and a business plan outline).
• Practical worksheets and tools for use by learners during and after the workshop (e.g. strategy planning worksheet).
• Tips, experiences, and guidance from interprofessional leaders who are “living” their own leadership journey.
• Opportunity to connect with leadership colleagues and find mentors.

This instructor-led certification review course is designed to help prepare you for your upcoming Hospice and Palliative Credentialing Center (HPCC) ACHPN certification exam. HPNA Certification Review Courses provide a framework to prepare, and a process to assess the strengths and weaknesses of content prior to sitting for an HPCC certification exam. These courses are facilitated by nationally recognized subject matter experts. Each module in the review course addresses sections of the detailed content outline from the 2022 HPCC Candidate Handbook.

HPCC is not able to conduct or recommend specific review courses. The use of HPNA exam preparation materials does not imply successful performance on HPCC certification exams. The use of HPNA exam preparation materials does not give an advantage over candidates who do not choose to use them. You will receive the access link to this course three days prior to the event. If you have not received the email three days prior, please contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .

Care of adult patients with hematologic or oncologic malignancies is increasingly complex. Hospice and palliative care (HPC) clinicians are now asked to care for them early in the course of care, based on evidence that early palliative care improves survival, symptoms, mood, cost, and patient & caregiver satisfaction. To ensure success of upstream involvement, HPC clinicians must be equipped to competently care for these patients and “speak the language” of the hematologist/oncologist and radiation oncologist, particularly in the outpatient setting.

This session will provide HPC clinicians the essentials needed to approach the care of these patients, including; terminology, systemic treatment options (chemotherapy, targeted therapy, immunotherapy, CAR-T cell therapy), prognostic uncertainty, radiotherapy, expected side effects of treatments, and the unique characteristics of hematologic malignancies.

The session will target attendees’ specific needs and questions, with real-time adjustment of the curriculum to fulfill their goals and provide appropriate resources. This session is informed by six years of workshops with improvements based on participant feedback. Upon completion of this session, HPC clinicians will have the tools necessary to develop an approach to the care of patients with hematologic or oncologic malignancies along the continuum of cancer care.

As the cultural and ethnic diversity of the United States continues to grow, palliative clinicians will invariably care for patients and interact with colleagues whose cultures, beliefs and practices differ from their own.1

Underrepresented minorities, women, and LGBTQIA+ communities - both patients and clinicians - face bias and discrimination in clinical settings. Bias can be implicit, meaning that it occurs unconsciously and unintentionally, or it can be explicit (i.e. discrimination). When faced with repeated bias, racism, and discrimination from colleagues and/or patients, clinicians experience low quality of life, job dissatisfaction, and burnout. When palliative clinicians demonstrate discriminatory behavior or exhibit poor communication due to implicit bias, this can lead to decreased quality of care and patients avoiding care.6 Discrimination within and outside of the healthcare environment can be a form of trauma. Trauma-informed care is a strategic framework focused on understanding the negative impact of traumatic events on health and how an emphasis on safety and empowerment promotes healing.

As we learn more about the impacts of implicit bias and discrimination and its role in health inequities, we as clinicians must make concerted efforts to educate ourselves on how to overcome these deficiencies. Active bystander and advocacy education can improve knowledge and confidence in interpreting and responding to both implicit bias and explicit discrimination in the clinical setting.7 Training in trauma-informed care can help clinicians better recognize and respond to trauma while actively resisting re-traumatization.

Through combining didactics and skills-based practice, participants will transform from a bystander to an upstander and incorporate trauma-informed care. In this process, participants can be empowered to address the behaviors of others and be more sensitive to their own, often unconscious, biased behavior. The tools imparted in this workshop will allow participants to educate their colleagues and trainees at their individual healthcare settings.

Learning Objectives:

• Define implicit bias, allyship, upstander, and trauma-informed care.
• Demonstrate knowledge in how to address bias, serve in the role of an ally and upstander, and apply trauma-informed care through case-based examples.

This interactive workshop introduces practitioners to several high-yield psychological concepts that can be incorporated into daily palliative care practice. Participants will develop working knowledge in creating a formulation of a patient’s and family’s unique psychological composition, which guides interactions more effectively with patients and referring clinicians.

This interprofessional session will employ diverse clinical vignettes to raise our self-awareness of countertransference (i.e. emotions and reactions toward our patients) to enhance inclusivity and sustainability of practice. Finally, participants will acquire several clinical techniques of therapeutic presence and using one’s own self as a therapeutic tool.

Back by popular demand. This interactive session will provide guidance for developing both leadership and poker skills. The first portion of the session will involve the use of didactic presentations, polls, group discussions to provide education on leadership, reading people, both at the poker table and in your work setting, using poker skills to mentor and lead your teams, and knowing which hands and initiatives to go all in on and which ones to fold. The last portion of the session will include actual poker instruction geared toward the novice poker player.

*Note: This is not a cash game and is for instructional purposes only.

Explore the transformative use of psychedelic-assisted therapies in the realm of palliative care and hospice during this enlightening and engaging 90-minute pre-conference session while you enjoy lunch. Attendees will benefit from a short presentation focused on the history of psychedelic therapies, legal issues, and recent research.

This presentation will be followed by a robust interactive discussion in a safe space where all questions and concerns will be addressed. Join us to navigate the considerations, clinical applications, and promising integration of these therapies within the holistic framework of palliative and hospice care.

*Note: Lunch is included.

This half-day workshop is designed for intermittent to advanced palliative and hospice providers looking to develop individualized treatment plans for difficult to manage symptoms within hospice and palliative care. Interdisciplinary faculty will present both non-pharmacological and pharmacological approaches to common and uncommon symptoms.

The expert panel will prepare five patient cases to discuss with the audience. Possible topics include, but are not limited to, pain, nausea, dyspnea, delirium, cough, hiccoughs, secretions, anxiety, and depression. A pre-conference survey will be sent to “crowd-source” the audience to guide development of focused cases and discussion that are of most interest. Each symptom will be discussed in the context of prognosis, differentiating treatment for patients with months to years remaining versus days to weeks.

A key point of emphasis is to provide participants with ample opportunity to actively engage with the expert panel and each other. Participants will be broken down into smaller groups to facilitate active discussion. A case will be presented, groups will think-pair-share, and then the conference faculty will provide concluding thoughts including available evidence/data. After these five cases have concluded, the audience will be given an opportunity to bring cases to discuss following a similar format described above albeit a shorter timeframe to maximize participant cases. Faculty will have additional cases prepared as for continued discussion as needed.

Assessing trainees on hospice and palliative medicine skills is important to the growth of our field and the impact on our patients. This preconference workshop will concentrate on shared mental models around observational tools, use videos to train others around observational skills, mitigating bias in assessment, understanding, and creating competency-based assessments, and sharing new assessment tools from other fields and the ACGME. Participants will be able to practice these skills and bring them back home to their institutions. This session is for all those that work with trainees in Hospice and Palliative Care, particularly for fellows.

This pre-conference interdisciplinary workshop is designed to engage learners with grief experiences from diverse types of loss through the lens of 3 different panel discussions:

1. Diane Shader Smith, the mother of Mallory who died of CF and whose memoir has been shared in the book "Salt in My Soul: An Unfinished Life" and the film of the same title, reviewed by the NYT.
2. The second panel consists of three bereaved family members with different losses through the lifecycle: an older adult with spousal loss to dementia speaking of prolonged grief, anticipatory and ambiguous loss; a Latinx mother who lost her 12-14 year-old daughter to DM and now works in the field of bereavement; and a young adult spousal loss.
3. The third panel is comprised of professionals in hospice and palliative care discussing loss and grief from the perspective of the professional, represented by a social worker, nurse, and physician in palliative care to reflect on the impact of numerous and continuous loss of patients offering an opportunity for self-reflection and conversations about vicarious loss and self-care.

Within the often hectic and demanding clinical practice of palliative care, clinicians are called to closely observe and process care encounters for deeper meaning and the benefit of all involved. Time to nurture these skills and to reflect is critical for optimal clinical practice and sustainability over time.

The Art Museum space can provide opportunities for educators and interprofessional clinicians to focus on more intentional observation in connecting to a piece of art. It can also allow for learning and exploration to be focused on themes like wellness, diversity, implicit bias, interprofessional work, joy, death, and resilience as a strategy for renewal within self and team care.

This engaging and intimate pre-conference workshop invites participants to experience art museum teaching, refining observation skills, and connecting to meaning while considering how to learn and apply these teaching strategies in their practice settings.

This fast-paced session is not for the faint of heart! This seminar delivers a solid half-day of opioid pharmacotherapy covers three primary themes. The first is results from an international consensus-building process on best practices in opioid conversion calculations, and dosing of “unique” opioids (such as levorphanol, and strategies for dosing methadone and buprenorphine). This segment will also include a discussion on advanced in managing opioid adverse effects and drug interactions. The second section addresses the complex situation of opioid selection during an era of opioid misuse and abuse, and specific selection of an opioid for a patient with a past or current history of misuse of controlled or illicit substances. The final act of the afternoon will be the appropriate selection and use of co-analgesics along with opioid therapy including duloxetine gabapentinoids, ketamine and cannabis. There’s no WAY anyone practicing in hospice or palliative care should miss this seminar. Buckle your seatbelts – this is going to be a FAST ride!

Part 1: How To Deal With Family Requests For Treatment You Think Are Unreasonable
Dealing with families who request treatments that the medical team thinks is unreasonable often leads to moral distress, and ruptured relationships. The goal of this talk is to give clinicians both a mental model and the communication skills needed to handle these difficult conversations.

Part 2: Words Matter: How Words and Phrases Shape Thoughts and Actions (and sometimes make us cringe!)
This preconference builds upon the session Words Matter: Words and Phrases That Make Us Cringe, presented at the Annual Assembly in 2023. Using the theories of psychological schema and linguistic relativism as springboards for discussion, we will discuss how preconceived ideas, often unconscious, can impact our use – and misuse – of language and determine what we pay attention to and act on. This can result in unintended and harmful assumptions and actions about, for example, symptom management, family relationships, goals of care, and prognosis. Literacy level, culture and native language, and written language will also be explored. Careful and mindful use of language is especially important in hospice and palliative care as we often only have one chance to “get it right.”