Palliative Care Not Just Hospice: About this Course

This palliative care course is designed to help you develop essential palliative care skills for immediate integration into your professional practice.

This course aims to equip you with basic palliative care skills applicable to your current work. We’ll delve into four key topics:

1. Exploring the nature of suffering: Understand the various domains of suffering and work with empathy to develop plans to address them.
2. Basic communication skills: Learn frameworks to organize conversations and respond to strong emotions, with opportunities for practice and adaptation to your context.
3. Self-awareness: Reflect on your core values and beliefs, which will inform empathic relationships with patients and their expressions of values and beliefs.
4. Whole person assessment: Gain tools to assess suffering comprehensively, identify goals of care, and prioritize interventions.

Future courses will cover pain management, psycho-social-spiritual distress, and physical symptom management, including practical caregiving skills. Thank you for joining us in bringing palliative care to those in need.

Special note on confidentiality. Many of us have had personal experiences with serious illness. You may have been diagnosed with a serious illness or perhaps a family member or friend. They may have benefited from palliative care or could have benefited from it. It will be natural to discuss some of these experiences in your assignments. We will provide detailed cases that will be used for assignments. You will be encouraged to apply what you learn in your life and work. You will be asked to complete part of some assignments with a family member, friend or patient after you have completed a patient simulation. Protect the confidentiality of others by not using real names, or any personal factors that could lead others to identify this person.

In a course like this, topics related to decisions or choices when facing a serious illness or when near life’s end are personal. This is why a module on self-awareness of your own values and beliefs is provided in the third week of this course. Your choices, values, and beliefs will often be different than other people you interact with and your fellow students. It is important to be respectful and engage in constructive dialogue. If there is disruptive or abusive responses to other’s beliefs and values you will be contacted and you may be dismissed as a student.

Thank you for taking this course.