Effects of a Primary Palliative Care Educational System for Teaching Learners at Different Levels of Training

Interest and appreciation for palliative care (PC) has resulted in increased demand for both PC services and education. The PC rotation has been shown to improve PC knowledge in medical students (MS) and internal medicine (IM) residents, and PC specialists stand poised to direct the primary PC education of learners at different levels of training. To concurrently teach learners of different levels of training on a busy PC service, we created an educational system that emphasizes management of learner schedules, organization of teaching activities, faculty development to improve teaching skills, and learner self-evaluation. Both MS and IM residents showed an improvement in self-assessed competence as well as increased comfort level with seriously ill patients after PC rotation. Careful adjustment of learner schedules has accommodated an increasing number of learners, while maintaining a low learner to faculty ratio. The PC educators face an exciting and daunting challenge as the number of patients with PC needs and the number of learners requesting PC experience grow. We continue to improve milestone-based PC assessment tools, to invest in faculty development, and to explore innovative ways to support PC educators as they strive to provide consistent PC education that is both useful for learners and can be incorporated into busy PC clinical practice.