Closing the Gaps: Designing an Accessible Palliative Care Curriculum for Resident Physicians

Outcomes 1. Evaluate current resident education models for teaching Hospice and Palliative Medicine topics and identify education gaps. 2. Adapt more effective methods for integrating Hospice and Palliative Medicine topics into current resident education models. Key Message This poster centers around assessing identified gaps in hospice and palliative medicine education topics among internal medicine, family medicine and med-peds residents at a large academic medical center, creating a series of five educational sessions based on needs assessment data, and measuring pre-and post-education session confidence levels. Introduction/Context The United States currently lacks enough palliative care (PC) physicians to meet the palliative care needs for all seriously ill patients. One way to address this need is to provide primary PC education to all resident physicians. The University of North Carolina (UNC) Internal Medicine (IM), Family Medicine (FM), and Med-Peds residencies currently lack a comprehensive Hospice and Palliative Medicine (HPM) curriculum. A recent needs assessment of UNC residents in the above specialties identified gaps in pain management and prognostic communication. Methods Five high yield topics were identified based on review of the literature1,2 and our internal needs assessment: Non-pain Symptom Management, Basics of Hospice, How to Discuss Prognosis, Communicating about Life Sustaining Measures, and Pain Management. Five expert clinicians were selected to deliver lectures, and a curriculum planning sheet was distributed. Pre and post-lecture surveys were distributed to assess resident characteristics, baseline confidence, and post-lecture confidence in the selected topics using a 5-point Likert scale of 1 being not very confident and 5 being extremely confident. Results 52 pre and post survey sets were collected during the didactics series. There was a statistically significant increase in self-reported confidence in lecture objectives for the non-pain symptom management, pain management, and basics of hospice topics. Increases in self-reported confidence for the lectures on prognosis and communication about life sustaining measures were not statistically significant. Conclusion Our needs assessment and lecture series improved resident confidence in key HPM topics and provides an excellent foundation for further HPM education throughout UNC and beyond. Keywords Workforce / Career DevelopmentQuality Improvement