WellStar Health System Hosts Ethics Forum

Diane E. Meier, M.D., FACP to serve as keynote speaker

MARIETTA, Ga., April 19, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- WellStar Health System hosts Diane E. Meier, M.D. as the at the 2011 Ethics Forum, "Crucial Conversations: Optimizing Quality of Life." Dr. Meier will present the keynote speech – "Palliative Care: Transforming the Care of Serious Illness." The 2011 Ethics Forum will be held on Wednesday, April 20 at the WellStar Development Center from 8:30 a.m. – 4:30 p.m. To register call 770-956-STAR (7827). The event is free of charge.

Dr. Diane E. Meier is Director of the Center to Advance Palliative Care (CAPC), a national organization devoted to increasing the number and quality of palliative care programs in the United States. Under her leadership the number of palliative care programs in U.S. hospitals has more than doubled in the last 5 years. She is also Director of the Lilian and Benjamin Hertzberg Palliative Care Institute; Professor of Geriatrics and Internal Medicine; and Catherine Gaisman Professor of Medical Ethics at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City.

"This is an exceptionally timely topic and presentation, said Richard Cohen, M.D., Chairperson, Ethics Committee at WellStar. "Our society is facing many issues within medicine, but none may be more important than the issues around end-of-life and palliative care. The issue of palliative care is about the quality of a patient's death and their loving family."

Dr. Meier is the recipient of the Clinical Excellence Award from Castle Connolly Medical, a five-year NIA Academic Career Leadership Award, and is principal investigator of an NCI-funded five-year multi-site study on the outcomes of hospital palliative care services in cancer patients. She has published extensively in all major peer-reviewed medical journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association. She edited the first textbook on geriatric palliative care, four editions of Geriatric Medicine and most recently Palliative Care: Transforming the Care of Serious Illness. As one of the leading figures in the field of palliative medicine, Dr. Meier has appeared numerous times on television and in print, including "ABC World News Tonight" and figured prominently in the Bill Moyers series "On Our Own Terms: Dying in America," a four-part documentary aired on PBS.

Diane E. Meier received her BA from Oberlin College and her MD from Northwestern University Medical School. She completed her residency and fellowship training at Oregon Health Sciences University in Portland. She has been on the faculty of the Brookdale Department of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine and Department of Medicine at Mount Sinai since 1983.

The vision of WellStar Health System is to deliver world-class healthcare through our hospitals, physicians and services.  WellStar Health System includes Cobb, Douglas, Kennestone, Paulding and Windy Hill hospitals; WellStar Medical Group; Urgent Care Centers; Health Place; Homecare; Hospice; Atherton Place; Paulding Nursing Center; and WellStar Foundation. For more information, call 770-956-STAR or visit www.wellstar.org.

SOURCE WellStar Health System