Being Mortal - Medicine and What Matters in the End

Being Mortal - Medicine and What Matters in the End is oragnized by AAACEUs. This Course has been approved for a maximum of Credit Hours: 16.

Course Overview:
“Beautifully written . . . In his newest and best book, Gawande . . . has provided us with a moving and clear-eyed look at aging and death in our society, and at the harms we do in turning it into a medical problem, rather than a human one.” The New York Review of Books

“Masterful . . . Essential . . . For more than a decade, Atul Gawande has explored the fault lines of medicine . . . combining his years of experience as a surgeon with his gift for fluid, seemingly effortless storytelling . . . In Being Mortal, he turns his attention to his most important subject yet.” Chicago Tribune.

Course Objectives:
• Review how the process of aging, frailty and dying unfolds and explain how people experience the end of their lives.
• Discuss clinician's ultimate limitations, failures and successes in their efforts to deal with patients as their life draws to a close.
• Explain how an elderly person's ultimate goal is not a good death but a good life - all the way to the very end.
• Discuss the transformation of nursing homes from "total institutions" which emphasizes only "safety" to a semblance of home that creates a life of worth and freedom for the residents.

Course Outline:
• Introduction
• The Independent Self
• Dependence
• Assistance
• A Better Life
• Letting Go
• Hard Conversations
• Courage
• Epilogue