Sean O’Mahony
Rush Medical College and Rush College of Nursing, USA
Biography
Sean O’Mahony is an academic palliative medicine physician and act as the Director for the Section of Palliative and Supportive Medicine at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. His clinical interests include end-of-life care, chronic pain management and the palliation of the sequelae of chronic illnesses. His principal clinical and research goal is to reduce health care disparities for underserved communities. He has directed multidisciplinary palliative medicine teams in academic medical centers that include social workers, chaplains, advanced practice nurses and physicians for 15 years. His fellowship at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center included one year devoted to clinical research He investigated the association between cancer pain and desire for hastened death. His research and teaching interests include pain management, end-of-life and palliative care, quality-of-life at the end-of-life and clinical outcomes and effectiveness of palliative care programs, and how to meet the needs of the underserved and minority communities at the end of life. He has implemented multidisciplinary research demonstration projects in palliative medicine in the Emergency Department, Intensive Care Unit, and Video-conference projects between long-term care and acute care settings and am co-demonstrating a three year multi-center multidisciplinary Chicago land educational demonstration program to expand access to palliative care in community settings across the metropolitan area. His current research activities include evaluation of the effectiveness of multi-institutional inter professional education programs, use of medical informatics to promote patient safety in relationship to use of opioid medications and integration of palliative medicine into the care of patients in the intensive care unit. He serves on the Diversity and Inclusion Taskforce for the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine (AAHPM).He is the current co-chair of the Diversity and Inclusion Committee for AAHPM