Learning with dandelion
All Day Workshops
Available to book online or in person*
A Talk to Remember
This interdisciplinary workshop is intended for all staff -providers, nurses, chaplains – who work with end-of-life patients. This is a deep dive into the psychology, linguistics, emotional and sociological realities of discussing decline and death. We focus on specific tactics for different kinds of interactions, how to grow awareness of our own communication styles. This is an advanced practice workshop, best for those with some experience with end- of-life care. There are absolutely ZERO “checklists” or “algorithmic” approaches (i.e. follow this workflow). This course works for any context from primary care to an oncology floor.
If the workshop is in person – content can be taught all analog (i.e. no slides) if the group prefers.
This workshop is 7 CE RN Credits. (We are hoping to be able to offer CME credits in the future.)
Cost per participant: $200.00 – Minimum 10 participants. (If you are in a rural setting and staff is very small, please contact us and we can customize pricing.)
You Helped Me Listen To What I Didn’t Want To Hear
This is a highly participatory workshop where we learn how to do linguistic analysis of palliative conversations. This workshop is intended for those who regularly are having conversations with patients and families about decline and mortality. We learn how to excavate how these conversations function, particularly when they are challenging. And we all know they can be tough, even to the most experienced and well-intentioned of us. We teach tactics for alignment, how to make complex medical realities clear, ethical ways to make recommendations, and much more.
If the workshop is in person – content can be taught all analog (i.e. no slides) if the group prefers.
This workshop is 8 CE RN Credits. (We are hoping to be able to offer CME credits in the future.)
Cost per participant: $250.00 – Minimum 5 participants. (If you are in a rural setting and staff is very small, please contact us and we can customize pricing.)
*primarily Western/Mountain states, but other locations will be considered.
Half-Day Workshops
Available to book online or in person*
ONCOLOGY
Designed specifically to help oncology teams to be able to robustly support patients whose time is becoming short. We focus on how to discuss realistic prognostic realities with kindness, how shared decision making is unique in oncology compared to other progressive diseases. We’ll share tactics for explaining hospice timing as well as using “most likely” rather than “best/worst” modeling in these conversations.
This workshop is 4 CE RN Credits.
Course Cost: $110.00 – Minimum 10 participants
EMERGENCY MEDICINE
For our beloved ED staff who deal with families surprised by the gravity of illness every day – this class is for you. We teach tactics for building trust in minutes rather than days, how to be a calm presence in the midst of chaos, and how to focus on key concepts to quickly build understanding. We’ll cover how to help a patient-centered, medically indicated admission take place, rather than a default or maximal admission staying the norm.
This workshop is 4 CE RN Credits.
Course Cost: $110.00 – Minimum 10 participants
I.C.U
Most of us come to ICU work thinking we will primarily be providing interventions to stabilize or even improve our patient’s lives during a life-threatening serious illness or grave medical event. However, many of us find ourselves working contexts where one out of three or four of our patients die during their admission, often of well-understood, progressive diseases (COPD, cancer, CKD, etc.). This class provides tactics for helping an entire ICU staff collaborate with one another to help dying patients and especially their families. We focus on how to explain complex medical realities in understandable ways, how to share disappointing news with compassion, and how to help families navigate a path that matches who the patient really is.
This workshop is 4 CE RN Credits.
Course Cost: $110.00 – Minimum 10 participants
*primarily Western/Mountain states, but other locations will be considered.
CLASSES – COMING SOON
“My Mom is a Fighter! We can’t ever give up.”
1 CE
Here, we look specifically at families and patients who are misperceiving medical reality and learn approaches to support such situations. There are tactics for unpacking misunderstandings, moving comprehension forward, and staying compassionately engaged.
Crying in the Clean Supply Room
2 CEs
This class is for anyone who works in environments where death is a constant – and while it feels important – it also feels consistently heavy, sad and maybe even frustrating or disappointing. This class offers approaches to allowing grief and loss to be an enfolded part of our work lives in a way that does not diminish or exhaust us, but instead can feel not just sustainable, but deeply meaningful. This class will not tell you to “get more resilient.”
The Gift of the “Difficult” Patient and/or Family
3 CEs
This is an examination into how our patients can be our instructors and pathway into new skills. Patients that we don’t understand well, or don’t know how to productively help and engage can be an excellent source for helping us grow our advanced communication skills. We look closely at patient’s contexts, backgrounds and personal philosophies and how these impact their approach to managing a body in decline. We also learn a lot about ourselves in terms of what “gets under our skin” and how to become more curious and reflective when we run across challenging situations.