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Virtual - Mindfulness & Spirituality SIG
Monday, May 11, 2020, 10:00 AM - 11:30 PM PDT
Category: Special Interest Groups

 

The Mindfulness and Spirituality SIG invites you to join us for our May meeting via Zoom

with guest speakers Daniel Khodabakhsh, M.D. and Barbara Demman, RN, MSN, ACNP, CNS 

 

Topic: Integrating Mindfulness into Hospice Work

Description: You will learn tools as therapists to promote safe environment, safe place, and safe communication with clients who are dying and how best to support their loved ones.  We will address some common barriers or challenges experienced when having end of life discussions with clients and loved ones.  Also, we will discuss what we can learn from death and what dying can teach us about living.
 
Speaker Bios:

Daniel Khodabakhsh, M.D.  (“Khoda”) is an Emergency Medicine physician at Antelope Valley Hospital in Lancaster.  He currently serves as a Volunteer Clinical Professor of the UCLA School of Medicine for his work in training UCLA ER residents at this busy trauma center. He completed medical school at UC Davis and residency training in Emergency Medicine at Harbor-UCLA.  Staying at Harbor-UCLA as the Global Health Fellow, he was deployed for a total of 9 months in Haiti as part of the rebuilding effort after the devastating earthquake of 2010.  He trained hundreds of Haitian first-responders, nurses and doctors in emergency care and also helped organize one of the first cholera treatment centers on the island at the start of the epidemic.   Daniel’s global health deployments have also included medical missions in the Philippines, Thailand and Panama.  Returning home from work abroad, he focused on the epidemic of healthcare worker burnout and became a trained mindfulness teacher with his amazing wife to provide freely available stress reduction courses to hospital staff.  In addition, he helped create the Antelope Valley Hospital palliative care service and has served as the Palliative Care Medical Director for after seeing patients and families in the ER that were getting inadequate palliative support.  Most recently Khoda started AV Supportive Care and Hospice and serves as its medical director, with the intention to provide high quality, locally based, palliative care and hospice services to the AV community.  Outside of the hospital, he enjoys being with his wife and friends, traveling…. that was until his daughter was born, now he loves chasing her around the house trying to keep destruction and chaos at a minimum inside their home.

Barbara Demman, RN, MSN, ACNP, CNS is a board certified acute care nurse practitioner and clinical nurse specialist.  Her twenty years of nursing clinical experience has ranged from large urban teaching hospitals in varying specialties to small community international centers.  She currently serves as nurse practitioner for Companion Hospice, lecturer at UCLA School of Nursing, and educator for Kaplan Inc.  

Barbara’s passion for global health concerns has paved the way for extensive international nursing work extending from the Caribbean, Africa, to South East Asia.  Most recently, she works with Ghana Emergency Medicine Collaborative training Ghanaian nurses. This program has successfully implemented the first ever-nursing certification program within Ghana.

Barbara has a strong interest in decreasing burnout symptoms and compassion fatigue among health care providers using mindfulness based interventions.  After experiencing her own burnout in 2008, she greatly values health promotion and wellness in nursing.  She has a current research study exploring if  “A brief mindfulness intervention will increase resilience among nurses caring for patients during the time of COVID-19 Pandemic”.   Barbara has had the great fortune to be a student of Buddhism in many different countries including Kopan Monastery in Nepal with intensive study in Mahayana Buddhism.   She also completed a yearlong fellowship at the UCLA Mindfulness Awareness Research Center.  She and her husband, an ER physician, have created and facilitate six week courses called S.H.A.R.P.- Stress in Healthcare: Awareness, Reduction, and Prevention.

Barbara also has a passion for working with patients and families throughout the entire dying process in her nurse practitioner role.  She advocates for those who are dying and facilitating patient and family wishes and care preferences at the end of life.  

In her spare time Barbara enjoys spending life with husband, baby girl Rocky, tap dancing and practicing the dharma. 

 

"The opinions of presenters at informal forums, such as Special Interest Groups (SIGs) or club meetings, and their approach to psychological issues and interventions do not represent a formal endorsement of any position by the Los Angeles County Psychological Association or its members.  The opinions, ideas, and concepts expressed are purely those of the presenter."

Contact: RSVP to Dr. Christina Barber-Addis at [email protected]