This module is designed for all healthcare and allied professionals that support patients with life limiting illness, including: doctors, nurses, health care managers, medical students, medical and pharmaceutical researchers, radiographers, health care educators, chaplains, medical volunteers, hospice personnel and social workers.
Palliative Care is a global issue and is a core skill for all health care professionals. Due to changes in disease and demographic profiles, all areas of healthcare and all health carers will necessarily engage with patients with palliative care needs. The Lancet Commission Report of 2017 "Alleviating the access abyss in palliative care and pain relief" identifies that almost half of the global deaths each year require palliative care input. The limited and inequitable spread of palliative care results in excess of six billion hours of serious health related suffering. As recognised by the World Health Organisation health care professionals should be competent and confident in applying the principles of Palliative Care “… training and continuing education on Palliative Care should be integrated as a routine element of, all undergraduate medical and nursing professional education, and as part of in-service training of caregivers at the primary care level.”(WHO, 2014)
The module provides opportunities for health and allied care professionals to engage, understand and develop the skills required to provide effective, evidenced based approaches to managing the needs of patients, and their families, with life limiting illness. The module does this by providing a range of educational modalities to ensure a comprehensive overview and practicable engagement with the learning materials. In addition, the module also meets nationally defined Competencies in Practice for the doctors training in general internal Medicine, Care of the Elderly and for most medical specialities.
In addition to traditional teaching approaches led by national and international academic and clinical experts, this module engages experiential learning to explore the challenges of clinical communication within this field. The integrated two-day Advanced Communication Skills Workshop is a core activity and learning is further supported by electronic self-directed learning opportunities. Students are encouraged to bring their own clinical experience into the discussion forums that examine clinical cases on pain and symptom management, ethical issues in decision making, psychosocial care and the effects of policy upon practice.
A week’s structured observational clinical placement is offered to national/international students within a specialist palliative care unit. The placement is structured to both challenge and consolidate learning within the module.
Teaching will be led from the Academic Palliative and End of Life Care Centre, Liverpool, and from the International Collaborative for Best Care for the Dying Person: the Centre is the lead site for the Collaborative, which brings together multidisciplinary practitioners in palliative and end of life care from 24 countries, who wish to build the evidence base for best care for dying patients through collaborative knowledge transfer, clinical excellence, research, service innovation and quality improvement.
Liverpool’s School of Medicine is ideally located for access to some of the UK’s leading specialist clinical units. Students will also benefit from the expertise within the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences research institutes teaching and research links with the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, and surrounding medical institutions.
On successful completion of this module you will achieve 30 academic credits at M Level (7).