Behind the Night, the surgery podcast, relevant and engaging content designed to help you dominate the day.

Welcome back to another surgical palliative care edition of Behind the Knife.

My name is Red Hoffman and I am an acute care surgeon at Mission Hospital on Asheville, North Carolina, and one of about 90 surgeons currently board certified in hospice and palliative medicine.

I am the founder and host of the surgical palliative care podcast and the co-founder of the recently launched surgical palliative care society.

I'd like to introduce you to my co-hosts for this episode, Dr. Zara Cooper and Dr. Amanda Stasney. Zara, can you introduce yourself?

Sure. Red, thank you so much for having me. My name is Zara Cooper. I'm a trauma and acute care surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.

And I am also one of about 90 surgeons currently board certified in hospice and palliative medicine. Red, I was number 63. I don't know which number you were.

I also am the Kessler Director of the Center for Surgery and Public Health also at Brigham and Women's Hospital and I am a health services researcher really setting the intersection of surgery, geriatrics and palliative care.

And we're so excited to have Zara with us. She really is a leader in the field of surgical palliative care research and I'm excited for her to share some of her experience with us tonight.

And Amanda, Amanda is one of my awesome PGY2 residents at the Mayhack General Surgery Program in Asheville, North Carolina. Hi, Amanda. Hi, Dr. Hoffman. Hi, Dr. Cooper. Thanks for joining us this time. Thanks again for being with us today, Amanda.

Hi, Amanda. You have to call me Zara while we're on the podcast.

We're on a first name basis on the night. So all together.

Okay.

All right. So today will be our first palliative care journal club.

Before we get started, Zara, as one of the early leaders in the field of surgical palliative care, I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about how the research in this field actually got started.

Yeah. Thanks, Red. I think it's an important question. And it's kind of crazy to think that, you know, we're 15, 20 years out from the first studies about palliative care and surgery.

As I think most of the listeners understand palliative care is an interdisciplinary medical field that is really focused on patient quality of life, patient experience and patient family experience of patients who are living with serious illness and serious illness is defined as anything.

That is life limiting burdensome to patient and families and negatively impacts quality of life.

And so you can imagine that there are a lot of surgical conditions that would certainly fall into that category.

The pioneers in palliative care include Balfour Mountain, who is actually the first person to coin the phrase palliative care.

And he was a urologist at McGill in Montreal, Jeff Dunn, who was the leader of the committee for surgical palliative care of the American College of Surgeons for many years.

And then Anne Mosenthal, who is a trauma in acute care surgeon previously at Rutgers, where she did a lot of the seminal work that we're going to discuss today and succeeded Jeff as the chair for the committee on surgical palliative care at the American College of Surgeons.

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