We Belong Together; Creating a State-Wide Hospice and Palliative Care Consortium (TH123)

Outcomes 1. Evaluate the importance of creating a hospice and palliative care collaboration 2. Formulate strategies that can be used in creating or promoting a peer-to-peer network As providers, we are constantly learning. We learn from textbooks, conferences, and our patients. We also learn from one another. As our community expands, we find more hospice and palliative care programs that, unfortunately, are isolated. Smaller programs, in particular, are disadvantaged, as each provider brings their own perspective and expertise to the field of palliative medicine. To network many of these hospice and palliative care programs in Texas, we created the University of Texas (UT) Palliative Consortium, which consists of five different hospice and palliative care programs, including 21 fellows and many more faculty members. This consortium embodies a synchronous, virtual Community of Practice (CoP) model. In this model, individuals start at the periphery (novice) and move centrally within the community of practice by engaging in practices, such as attaining knowledge and skills, or authentic experiences. Centrality in a CoP is not the same as seniority or hierarchy but depends on expertise. In this consortium, fellows and faculty from different programs gain the opportunity to learn from a wider variety of expertise in the broader palliative care community. In this concurrent session, we will discuss the formation of this consortium, including our initial barriers, and highlight the importance of having a more extensive network. Here, we will discuss providing better access to educational opportunities for smaller hospice and palliative care programs that may not have a wide variety of expertise. We will present strategies used to foster peer-to-peer learning, including creating a state-wide journal club. We will also illustrate how we fostered scholarly activity among the different programs in our consortium. Our ultimate goal will be to share our experience and provide the building blocks to foster other communities from different regions to create a collaboration.