Heme/onc plus palliative care

[coffeebeanjenn]

Any heme/onc doctors out there who also manage palliative care for their patients? Are you able to manage palliation without a palliative care fellowship? Anyone do dual fellowships?

This is attractive to me, because it seems like it would be a great continuity of care. But I could also see this as being almost a "conflict" of goals, or unrealistic as far as time/clinic goes.

Some of the oncologists I've worked with do manage end of life care for their patients, but I'm in an academic setting. I'm curious if this is exceptional and whether it happens in the private care setting.

Thanks!!

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[gutonc]

They're definitely out there, bit they're not that common. I dont really see it as a conflict of interest simply because we're all supposed to do what's best for our patients. Sometimes that's more who, sometimes that's hospice.

What I definitely see a lot of are people who thought they wanted to do Onc, decide to go into pall care instead, or to go back later in their career as an oncologist and do a pall care fellowship then as something of a retirement plan.

But there's certainly no reason not to do both if that's what you want.

 

[Cirrus83]

I know of oncologists who manage the palliative care themselves, and AFAIK they never did a separate fellowship for it and have been doing it for decades now. But I don't see why you couldn't do a fellowship year in it as well, palliative care is a 1 year fellowship and I know people who add it to all sorts of specialties. There's one guy I know who's gonna end up having to take a crapload of boards at this rate though since he's EM/IM/CritCare/Palliative.

 

[carrigallen]

I'm not sure how the additional year of fellowship is worth it. I think you can do hospice program work as an oncologist, and certainly manage cancer-related pain non-operatively as an oncologist. I suppose you may be on thin ice if prescribing for chronic non-malignant pain in the high risk population without the additional fellowship.