COVID-19 Lessons: The Alignment of Palliative Medicine and Trauma-Informed Care.

As the COVID-19 pandemic wears on, its psychological, emotional, and existential toll continues to grow and indeed may now rival the physical suffering caused by the illness. Patients, caregivers, and health-care workers are particularly at risk for trauma responses and would be well served by trauma-informed care practices to minimize both immediate and long-term psychological distress. Given the significant overlap between the core tenets of trauma-informed care and accepted guidelines for the provision of quality palliative care (PC), PC teams are particularly well poised to both incorporate such practices into routine care and to argue for their integration across health systems. We outline this intersection to highlight the uniquely powerful role PC teams can play to reduce the long-term psychological impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Rapid Implementation of Inpatient Telepalliative Medicine Consultations During COVID-19 Pandemic.

As coronavirus disease 2019 cases increase throughout the country and health care systems grapple with the need to decrease provider exposure and minimize personal protective equipment use while maintaining high-quality patient care, our specialty is called on to consider new methods of delivering inpatient palliative care (PC). Telepalliative medicine has been used to great effect in outpatient and home-based PC but has had fewer applications in the inpatient setting. As we plan for decreased provider availability because of quarantine and redeployment and seek to reach increasingly isolated hospitalized patients in the face of coronavirus disease 2019, the need for telepalliative medicine in the inpatient setting is now clear. We describe our rapid and ongoing implementation of telepalliative medicine consultation for our inpatient PC teams and discuss lessons learned and recommendations for programs considering similar care models.