(NEWARK, N.J., March 18, 2008) – Julia Duane Quinlan, mother of Karen Ann Quinlan, whose legal battle to remove her daughter from a respirator changed the use of life-support for the dying, will present the second annual Joe and Julia Quinlan Award to Dr. John Gregory from Overlook Hospital, Summit, N.J., and posthumously to Rev. Charles J. Hudson and Margaret J. Coloney from the Center for Hope Hospice, Scotch Plains, N.J., during the third annual New Jersey-End-of-Life Nursing Education Consortium on March 27.
The conference, hosted by the College of Nursing Center for Professional Development at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, will be held at the Sheraton Atlantic City Convention Center Hotel in Atlantic City, N.J., March 27-28.
The Joe and Julia Quinlan Award is given to a New Jersey layperson, professional or volunteer who has made a significant difference in the provision of palliative care, hospice care or end of life care.
This interdisciplinary conference is intended for health care professionals to learn about best practices in end-of-life and palliative care. NJ-ELNEC will feature such speakers as Dr. R. Sean Morrison, director of the National Palliative Care Research Center; Rev. Kathleen Rusnak, former director of Spiritual Care at The Connecticut Hospice; William P. Isele, former New Jersey ombudsman for the Institutionalized Elderly; Regina S. Cunningham, chief nursing officer at Cancer Institute of New Jersey and assistant professor in the Research Division, Department of Family Medicine at UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School; Dr. Richard Payne, a leading expert in pain relief, care for those near death, oncology and neurology; and Jay Tashiro, chief executive officer and founder of Wolfsong Informatics.
To register or for more information, call the College of Nursing Center for Professional Development at (973) 353-5895 or register online at http://nursing.rutgers.edu/cpd.
NJ-ELNEC is a national education program to improve end-of-life care by nurses and is funded by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant. The primary goals are to develop a core of expert nursing educators and to coordinate national nursing education efforts in end-of-life care.
From its headquarters at Rutgers Newark, Rutgers College of Nursing offers a broad range of academic programs on all three Rutgers campuses. The college offers a master’s program with unique practitioner specialties, a Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) degree, and the first to offer a Ph.D. nursing degree in New Jersey.