Palliative Care Grand Rounds

Barbara and Eric Mann have generously supported the Pediatric Palliative Care Service since 2007. Their sponsorship allows for specialized education and training for highly skilled clinicians in order to enhance the care of patients and families at Seattle Children’s Hospital.

As a tribute to their generosity, we have established an annual Pediatric Palliative Care Grand Rounds in their honor.  

May 16, 2024

An Interprofessional Team Intervention to Improve Communication With Families With Seriously Ill Children – Mann Family Pediatric Palliative Care Lecture

Speaker: Jennifer K. Walter, MD, PhD, MS
An associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, and an attending physician in general pediatrics and pediatric palliative care at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). She is also director of the Department of Medical Ethics at CHOP.

Since her training in both medicine and philosophy, Dr. Jennifer Walter has worked at the intersection of clinical practice and bioethics with an emphasis on the physician-patient relationship and family-centered care. Her current research focuses on facilitating and improving communication between the healthcare team and families of children with serious illness. She is developing interventions to better train interprofessional teams in collaboration and communication to improve outcomes for patients and families.  She has received grant funding from the National Palliative Care Research Center and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the NIH and is a Cambia Foundation Sojourns Scholar.

“In working with an exceptional interprofessional team as part of PACT, I wanted to study how to best train interprofessional teams in communicating with families of seriously ill children. My clinical work sheds light on families’ challenges and drives my research to improve how we as pediatricians, nurses, social workers, chaplains, etc., care for seriously ill children. I am honored to learn from families and team members every day and strive to support them in the difficult journeys that they are on.”

September 21, 2023

My Child’s Life Is Worth Saving: Addressing Racism in Serious Illness Communication – Mann Family Pediatric Palliative Care Lecture

Speaker: Tessie October, MD, MPH
A pediatric intensive care and hospice and palliative care medicine physician who joined the Pediatric Trauma and Critical Illness Branch at the NIH as a medical officer in 2020.

Dr. Tessie October is a board-certified physician in pediatrics, pediatric critical care and palliative and hospice medicine. She blends expertise from these three areas to serve her academic mission of transforming the communication healthcare experience for patients and families as they navigate critical illness. She is a clinical scientist who designs interventions that teach the healthcare team high-quality communication skills necessary to support family decision-making. She also develops interventions to activate families to ensure they have a seat at the decision-making table. As an educator, October uses her expertise to train the next generation of physicians and faculty to provide empathetic, equitable, family-centered care. 

May 19, 2022

Centering the Good – Mann Family Pediatric Palliative Care Lecture

Speaker: Blyth Lord, EdM
Founder and Executive Director, Courageous Parents Network

Blyth Lord is the founder and Executive Director of Courageous Parents Network, a national non-profit whose mission it is to empower, guide and support parents caring for children with serious illness and the pediatric providers that care for them. Lord's daughter, Cameron, and nephew, Hayden, died of Tay-Sachs disease in 2001. In the years following, she has promoted the needs of families caring for children with serious illness and how providers can best meet these needs. She is an involved and vocal advocate for pediatric palliative care. Drawing on more than 20 years of experience as a television producer (ABC News, Medical News Network, WGBH), she produced the award-winning film Cameron’s Arc with the American Academy of Pediatrics to educate doctors in working with families from the time of diagnosis through to the end of life. Cameron’s Arc has been distributed nationally as a teaching tool to pediatric residency programs across the United States. Lord is an affiliate member of the AAP’s Section on Hospice and Palliative Medicine and a co-chair of the section’s Parent Advisory Group. She is also immediate past president of National Tay-Sachs and Allied Disease, the patient disease group. She received her BA in history from Yale College and has a master’s in education from Harvard. 

May 20, 2021

Meeting Ethical Challenges With Integrity: Cultivating Moral Resilience

Speaker: Cynda Hylton Rushton, PhD, RN, FAAN
Johns Hopkins University

Dr. Cynda Hylton Rushton is the Anne and George L. Bunting Professor of Clinical Ethics at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics and the School of Nursing, and co-chairs the Johns Hopkins Hospital’s Ethics Committee and Consultation Service. In 2016, she co-led a national collaborative State of the Science Initiative: Transforming Moral Distress into Moral Resilience in Nursing, and co-chaired the American Nurses Association professional issues panel that created A Call to Action: Exploring Moral Resilience Toward a Culture of Ethical Practice. She was a member of the National Academies of Medicine, Science and Engineering Committee that produced the report Taking Action Against Clinician Burnout: A Systems Approach to Professional Well-Being. She is a member of the American Nurses Association Center for Ethics and Human Rights Ethics Advisory Board and American Nurses Foundation Well-Being Initiative Advisory Board. She is the editor and author of Moral Resilience: Transforming Moral Suffering in Healthcare. Rushton is a Hastings Center Fellow and Chair of the Hastings Center Fellows Council and a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing.