PCNOW Celebrates Fast Fact #501 – The Birth and Growth of Fast Facts: 25 Years of Advancing Palliative Care Education by Dr. David E. Weissman

Dr. Eric Warm from the University of Cincinnati presented his work on improving end-of-life education in his Internal Medicine residency program at a training conference I led in 2000 (End-of-Life Residency Education Project) (EREP). Standing in the back of the conference room I thought, “This is a brilliantly simple idea: prepare a short, half-page review of a palliative care topic, and stuff it in faculty mailboxes; don’t ask permission, just do it.” He described an enthusiastic response from his colleagues and thus the idea of Fast Facts was born.

I took his idea, converted the paper version to an unsolicited email, and sent it to a range of faculty at the Medical College Wisconsin and had the same positive response. The faculty for the EREP (Susan Block, Charles von Gunten, Jim Hallenbeck, and Bruce Ambuel) were recruited to be the first reviewers and we started to distribute Fast Facts to all the residency programs participating in the project.  From there it quickly grew, and requests came to further expand distribution on a national and international basis. After several years, I recruited my former palliative care fellows Dr. Drew Rosielle and Dr. Sean Marks to take on the editorial duties and they have carried on the Fast Fact program magnificently.

My humble thanks to the hundreds of authors and reviewers who have added to the Fast Fact archive.

David E Weissman, MD