Recently, six of the Paradigm Health nurse practitioner team received symptom management and pain management designations from the Center to Advance Palliative Care (CAPC). Paradigm Health is committed to supporting their team through continuing education.
What is a CAPC Designation?
The Center to Advance Palliative Care (CAPC) was established to increase access to quality palliative care services. CAPC leads the nation in providing health care professionals and organizations with the training, tools, and technical assistance necessary to meet this need. An important part of this mission is ensuring that all clinicians working with seriously ill patients have key skills, many of which are not yet taught in standard clinical education.
A CAPC Designation reflects a clinician’s proven commitment to continued progress in improving the care of patients living with a serious illness, and their families.
How can a CAPC Designation Help Patients?
Pain Management
Paradigm Health’s nurse practitioners learn through the pain management designation process how to Improve quality of life and patient satisfaction through safe and appropriate pain management, while preventing costly and burdensome crises such as recurring emergency room visits and hospital readmissions. The pain management course covers which patients are appropriate to consider for opioid therapy, how to assess risk for substance use disorder, and how to safely prescribe, monitor, and document opioid therapy in alignment with the Federation of State Medical Boards prescribing guidelines
Symptom Management
Paradigm Health’s nurse practitioners learn through the symptom management designation process how to improve patient quality of life and prevent avoidable crises for patients with serious illness through expert management of common symptoms. Uncontrolled symptoms lead to preventable suffering and crises that often result in recurring emergency room visits and hospitalizations for patients and their families. CAPC’s symptom management course covers techniques for assessing and managing common sources of distress, including nausea, constipation, dyspnea, depression, and anxiety. Pain is a much-feared side effect of many serious illnesses but is manageable with proper training.
How CAPC Designation Translates to Palliative Care for Our Patients
Working Together as a Team
As part of Paradigm Health’s community-based, holistic approach to palliative care, having an advocate to help partner, support and lead a patient’s palliative care can be valuable and allow for a collaborative and streamlined approach to chronic disease management and serious illness pain management. Providing services to Central Indiana and beyond, Paradigm Health acts as an extra layer of hands-on care to assist in patient care but does not replace a patient’s primary care physician or duplicate efforts.
Benefits of Our Team Approach
- A community-based approach to palliative care can allow a Paradigm Health nurse practitioner to pull everything together for the patient.
- It can streamline, collaborate, organize and facilitate resources but does not replace the primary care physician or any specialists. It can aggregate the information for the patient to create a unique plan of care goals for each patient.
- Allows a Paradigm Health licensed clinical social workers to focus on supportive counseling to assist patients in understanding and coping with the changes in their medical status or to assist in advanced care planning.
- Strengthens the lines of communication between all medical clinicians to make sure all caregiving is collaborative and shared.
- Is available for patients no matter where they call home.
