Time is Short: Tools to Integrate Palliative Care and Communication Skills Education into Your Surgical Residency

The need to integrate palliative care (PC) training into surgical education has been increasingly recognized. Our aim is to describe a set of PC educational strategies, with a range of requisite resources, time, and prior expertise, to provide options that surgical educators can tailor for different programs. Each of these strategies has been successfully employed individually or in some com-bination at our institutions, and components can be gen-eralized to other training programs. Asynchronous and individually paced PC training can be provided using existing resources published by the American College of Surgeons and upcoming SCORE curriculum modules. A multiyear PC curriculum, with didactic components of increasing complexity for more advanced residents, can be applied based on available time in the didactic sched-ule and local expertise. Simulation-based training in PC skills can be developed to provide objective compe-tency-based training. Finally, a dedicated rotation on a surgical palliative care service can provide the most immersive experience with steps toward clinical entrust-ment of PC skills for trainees. ( J Surg Ed 80:1669-1674.(c) 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. on behalf of Association of Program Directors in Surgery. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/))