An Interprofessional Primary Palliative Care Curriculum for Health Care Trainees and Practicing Clinicians

Brook A Calton; Naomi Saks; Thomas Reid; Nancy Shepard-Lopez; Bridget Sumser

doi:10.1089/pmr.2021.0074

An Interprofessional Primary Palliative Care Curriculum for Health Care Trainees and Practicing Clinicians

Palliat Med Rep. 2022 May 5;3(1):80-86. doi: 10.1089/pmr.2021.0074. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Brook A Calton^{1

2}, Naomi Saks², Thomas Reid², Nancy Shepard-Lopez², Bridget Sumser²

Affiliations

¹ Division of Palliative Medicine and Geriatrics, Department of Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
² Division of Palliative Medicine, Department of Medicine, The University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, California, USA.

Abstract

Background: Equipping all interprofessional clinicians with foundational palliative care competencies is essential to address the complex needs of the growing number of adults living with chronic, progressive, or life-threatening serious illness. There is a paucity of high-quality, open-access primary palliative care curricula and to the best of our knowledge, none designed interprofessionally.

Objective: As an interprofessional team, we aimed at designing and evaluating an interactive primary palliative care education curriculum for interprofessional clinicians and trainees.

Design: We developed a curriculum that includes nine 55-minute interactive modules facilitated by two interprofessional clinicians in small groups of 8-12 interprofessional learners.

Setting/subjects: Thirty-two practicing interprofessional clinicians from the San Francisco Bay Area enrolled in the pilot.

Measurements: Pilot curriculum evaluation included electronic surveys pre- and post-module and at completion of the full curriculum.

Results: The final evaluation response rate was 44%. Ninety-three percent of survey respondents rated the curriculum's quality as "very good" or "excellent"; 86% of respondents felt the curriculum was "extremely" or "very useful" to their clinical practice. Comparing pre- and post-module survey data, statistically significant (p < 0.01) improvements in learner confidence were seen for each of the 25 curriculum learning objectives with an average improvement of 2.8 points.

Conclusions: The curriculum was well received and was associated with an increase in learner confidence. This novel, flexible, and tuition-free curriculum fills an important educational gap and can be used to equip frontline, interprofessional clinicians with the core palliative care knowledge, skills, and attitudes to take the best possible care of seriously ill patients and families.

Keywords: curriculum development; interprofessional education; primary palliative care education.