Our Mission
The CSU Shiley Haynes Institute for Palliative Care Provides High-Quality Education to Healthcare Professionals and Students, Builds Advocacy, and Promotes Research to Advance the Care of Those Living with Serious Illness and Their Communities.
Commitment to Palliative Care Education
We are dedicated to expanding access to palliative care by educating current and future healthcare professionals and building community awareness and advocacy to make excellent palliative care available to all who need it. Whether it is through training current professionals, supporting faculty to integrate palliative care into curriculum for future professionals, or creating a space for dialogue and learning about palliative care through the National Symposium, we stand firmly committed to providing opportunities for palliative care education for all.
Building Partnerships Within and Between Communities
Our campus partners build awareness of palliative care through programs for students, faculty, health professionals, and caregivers in their communities. Our Campus Partners have a local focus, working to create innovative programs that expand awareness of and access to palliative care in the diverse communities they serve. Since 2012 more than 26K students and 25K community members have participated in palliative care outreach and education programs through our campus partners across the CSU system.
Continuing Education for Current Healthcare Professionals
Our interactive and engaging online courses offer training for current healthcare professionals in the skills they need to deliver the best, evidence-based care to individuals with chronic or serious illness. Our courses are tailored to help nurses, social workers, physicians, chaplains, and other health professionals make a measurable impact on the care they deliver to their patients. We engage a wide variety of palliative care professionals to create and deliver our curriculum, including subject matter experts, clinical leaders, consultants, and university faculty. Since 2012, more than 32K health professionals from all 50 states and 49 countries worldwide have enrolled in our courses and all of our courses offer Continuing Education Hours. Choose from instructor-led or self-paced courses available online, anytime. These courses are open to individuals as well as healthcare and hospital systems.
National Symposium for Academic Palliative Care Education and Research
June 2—4, 2025
Since 2014, over 1,200 professionals from universities, academic medical centers, healthcare systems, health plans, hospices and community hospitals have attended our symposium. It is the only event of its kind in the country designed for university faculty, practitioners, and researchers focused on advancing palliative care.
Leading Educated Palliative Care
Discussions & Research
“I am so pleased to support a program that will ultimately benefit others the way I have been personally helped. My late husband’s experience with hospice and palliative care made me realize how specialized and important the field of palliative care is today and the growing need for such care in the future.”
Advance your career with convenient, online coursework and evidence-based instruction, all backed by the standards of California State University.
Select A Discipline:
Download Course CatalogBeyond Cultural Humility: Diversity, Inclusivity, and Navigating Bias in Care
Learners enrolled in this course explore aspects of diversity, equity, and inclusion to develop self-awareness and build professional skills that promote a safe and welcoming workplace environment.
Excellence in Interprofessional Palliative Care Documentation
Explore discipline-specific and team-focused strategies for ensuring that your documentation facilitates communication and supports effective and productive relationships within the team and referral sources. If you are looking to build a more cohesive team and improve documentation and referral processes,...
Telemedicine Skills for Clinicians
In the era of COVID-19, the world of healthcare—including palliative care—experienced a sudden shift in how care is delivered: Almost overnight, clinicians across sectors and settings migrated their patient encounters online. As a result, a significant portion of healthcare encounters...
Self-Care and Resilience
Self-care and building resilience is essential for clinicians working with seriously ill patients—it guards against burnout, moral distress, and team dysfunction. This course provides practical tools and resources to help healthcare professionals recognize the warning signs of moral distress, identify...
Advanced Concepts in Easing Suffering and Promoting Healing for Pediatric Patients
This course focuses on some of the most difficult emotional and spiritual aspects of caring for young patients at the end of life, including transference and countertransference, trauma-informed care, types of grief, caring for diverse families, and empowering patients and families in end-of-life decision making.
Advanced Communication Skills for Pediatric Patient and Family Support
Effective communication is a cornerstone of quality palliative care. Communicating effectively with children, teens, and young adults with serious illness, and their families, requires a skilled approach that is attuned to the patient’s developmental age and stage. This course explores topics...
Advanced Pediatric Care Delivery
This course explores the key clinical features of rare complex conditions seen in pediatric hospice and palliative care. Learn how you can help parents advocate for their child while recognizing the limits of medical interventions, and identifying medical and psychosocial...
Advanced Pediatric Pain and Symptom Assessment and Management
Assessing and managing pain is a fundamental part of high quality palliative care. There are important differences to consider when caring for infants, children, teens, or young adults. This self-paced course delivers robust clinical skills aimed at effectively assessing and...
Advanced Practice Palliative Care Certificate for Social Workers
Gain expert skills in palliative care social work and learn how to navigate the diverse demands of your role, assess psychosocial distress, apply appropriate interventions to support patients and families, and emerge as a leader on a palliative care team.
Advanced Practice RN Certificate in Palliative Care
Transform your career. Learn evidence-based approaches in pain and symptom management to help support resilience and ease patients’ suffering. Help patients and families identify care goals of care. Build interdisciplinary teams.
Applying Motivational Interviewing Techniques and Interventions in Palliative Care
Gain a deeper understanding of motivational interviewing techniques and explore ways to integrate this method into your work with patients.
Aromatherapy in Palliative Care
Aromatherapy, or the use of essential oils to promote well-being, has a growing base of research in modern health care. Learn how aromatherapy can support palliative care patients and their families.
Basic Communication Skills for Pediatric Patient and Family Support
Hospice and palliative care professionals work with many types of families in crisis and grief. Yet, even experienced clinicians may feel anxious when delivering care to infants, children, teens, or young adults. This course describes the challenges and joys of communicating...
Basic Concepts of Easing Suffering and Promoting Healing for Pediatric Patients
The progressive illness and/or impending death of an infant, child, teen, or young adult can cause profound grief in the patient as well as the family. This course focuses on supporting those who are grieving and explores the importance of...
Basic Pediatric Care Delivery
Many children, teens, and young adults with serious or life-limiting illness have been using medical devices since birth. Some pediatric patients may outgrow the need for such devices, while others will remain dependent on them throughout their lives. This course examines...
Basic Pediatric Pain and Symptom Assessment and Management
Assessing and managing pain is a fundamental part of high quality palliative care and it requires a specialized approach when caring for infants, children, teens, or young adults. This course comprises four modules that highlight important considerations and effective clinical...
Billing for Advance Care Planning Conversations
This online course explores strategies to encourage patient participation in advance care planning conversations. Case studies illustrate how Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes are used in various scenarios, followed by an interactive exercise to help students apply the knowledge learned...
Care of the Patient at the End of Life
Caring for patients nearing end of life requires an increased level of knowledge and skills. This course delivers evidence-based tools and resources in prognostication, communication, and symptom management, helping you better identify and support these patients and their families. You’ll...
Certificate in Clinical Pediatric Palliative Care
This self-paced, online education series explores concepts and strategies integral to pediatric palliative care to help hospice and palliative care clinicians expertly support young patients with serious illnesses and their families.
Communication and Advance Care Planning
Effective communication skills are essential to quality healthcare, and especially crucial for providers caring for patients with chronic or serious disease. This course delivers strategies for improving communication with patients and families while reducing barriers to effective communication about diagnosis,...
Communication Strategies for Shared and Informed Decision Making
Learn key strategies to enhance provider-patient communication, how to help patients understand where they are in the disease process, identify care goals, activate shared decision making, and more.
Core Concepts in Palliative Care – All Health Professionals
This course provides all health professionals with a common framework to understand palliative care and equips them with essential tools to implement a unified, holistic, and patient-centered care plan.
Core Concepts in Palliative Care – Chaplains
Gain a deeper understanding of the chaplain’s role as a member of an interdisciplinary team and learn more about chaplaincy practices unique to palliative care and seriously ill patients. The All Health Professionals course is included with the Nurse, Social Work, and Chaplain courses, so all team members share common concepts, vocabulary, and approaches.
Core Concepts in Palliative Care – Nurses
Tailored for nursing professionals, this course focuses on the skills and approaches designed to integrate palliative care into the overall care of chronically and seriously ill patients. The All Health Professionals course is included with the Nurse, Social Work, and Chaplain courses, so all team members share common concepts, vocabulary, and approaches.
Core Concepts in Palliative Care – Social Workers
Designed to build on the patient-centered skills and strengths of social workers, this course explores important concepts in the care of seriously ill patients, such as values, ethics, mindfulness, self-care, resilience, death, and grief. The All Health Professionals course is included with the Nurse, Social Work, and Chaplain courses, so all team members share common concepts, vocabulary, and approaches.
Cultural Aspects of Care
Widely ranging cultural backgrounds are present in most communities and frontline clinicians, including those in primary care and subspecialty practices, must be culturally aware on all levels. Serious illness presents even more complex challenges. This course explores the cultural sensitivity tools,...
Effective Advance Care Planning Fundamentals
Advance care planning empowers patients to identify what gives their life meaning and articulate the kind of healthcare treatments they would want, or not want, if a catastrophic event or illness leaves them unable to speak for themselves. This course provides...
Essentials of Palliative Care Chaplaincy
Master the full-circle model of spiritual care in this 8-week, instructor-led course. Learn to support patient goals and quality of life, manage physical and spiritual pain, practice cultural humility, support religious differences, and more.
Facilitating an Advance Care Planning Conversation
This 1-hour course delivers strategies for conducting advance care planning discussions with patients and families by focusing on their goals and what matters most to them. Learn when and how to confidently begin advance care planning conversations, and apply concepts and skills through interactive activities.
Food is Medicine Series – Nutrition in Palliative Care
Good nutrition is an essential part of holistic palliative care. This self-paced series explores the latest research, and teaches practical skills and approaches for using nutrition to improve quality of life at any stage of illness.
Foundational Communication Skills for Pediatric Patient and Family Support
In pediatric palliative care, honest, respectful, and open communication is essential to supporting children, teens, and young adults and their families, and to providing quality, compassionate care. This course explores how to determine the right time for an initial home visit...
Foundational Concepts of Easing Suffering and Promoting Healing for Pediatric Patients
The progressive illness or impending death of an infant, child, teen, or young adult can cause profound grief in the patient as well as the family. This self-paced online course prepares hospice and palliative care professionals to recognize and address...
Foundational Pediatric Care Delivery
This self-paced course takes a deep dive into the differences between palliative care and hospice, and how they differ for adults and children. It reviews concurrent care for children, including how to identify patients who are eligible, exploring a wide...
Foundational Pediatric Pain and Symptom Assessment and Management
Assessing and managing pain in seriously ill infants, children, teens, or young adults is integral to high quality pediatric palliative care. This 7-hour course highlights key considerations and effective clinical strategies needed to address the physical symptoms of advanced illness...
Healing Through Art
Learn how creative self-expression promotes healing and how to guide others in art activities that help them ease anxiety, process grief, and build resilience.
Integrating Advance Care Planning Into Your Medical Practice
Advance care planning conversations help patients consider and document the treatment choices they would make if they could no longer speak for themselves. Such conversations are a routine part of healthcare, but guiding patients through them takes skill and a...
Integrating Palliative Care into Practice
Providers are responsible for running hectic office practices or specialty offices, seeing large volumes of patients with little time, and serving thousands of patients each year. Developing primary palliative care services can often enhance some care and services already being...
Introduction to Primary Palliative Care
This course delivers a clear and efficient overview of palliative care, how it’s delivered across a variety of settings, and how to identify patients who need it. You’ll explore the evidence base for palliative care, learn to identify common trajectories...
Introduction to Pediatric Palliative Care
Pediatric palliative care differs from palliative care for adults, especially as the end of life approaches. These differences affect not only patients and families, but the hospice and palliative care professionals delivering care. This course introduces you to the challenges, benefits,...
Multidisciplinary Certificate in Pediatric Palliative Care
While palliative care is designed to ease suffering in patients at any age and stage of serious illness, caring for pediatric patients differs significantly from palliative care for adults and requires an extra level of skill. Designed for social workers, chaplains,...
Palliative Care for Care Managers
Learn the fundamentals of palliative care and enhance skills that help you build stronger and supportive connections with seriously ill patients and their families.
Pediatric Ethical Principles and Challenges
Ethics play an important role in all areas of healthcare and can present unique challenges in pediatric palliative care where healthcare decision making and family dynamics may be more complex. These factors, and the emotional toll of caring for a...
Pediatric Team Support
Interdisciplinary teams are the cornerstone of palliative care, but can be vulnerable to challenges that arise when patients experience intense suffering caused by serious or life-limiting illness. Those issues can be heightened when the patient is a child, creating fear...
Physical Aspects of Care
This course equips providers in primary care, oncology, hematology, or other practice settings with the latest clinical strategies to effectively assess and manage pain and other distressing symptoms in patients with serious illnesses. It includes in-depth content and guidelines on the...
PA Certificate in Palliative and Serious Illness Care
Learn evidence-based approaches essential to primary palliative care, including communication, advance care planning, prognostication, assessing, and treating common physical symptoms of serious illnesses, care at the end of life, and more.
Primary Palliative Care Skills for Every Provider
Improve patient care, reduce costs, learn when to refer and how to bill for palliative care services. Earn accredited CEs with this evidence-based curriculum series, created specifically for clinicians in all settings who are caring for chronic and seriously ill patients.
RN Certificate in Palliative Care
For nurses working in hospice and palliative care or another care setting, this course provides you with the tools you need to better support patients and caregivers. Explore trajectories of common diseases and build expert skills in pain and symptom management, addressing emotional suffering, and caring for patients at the end of life.
Self-Care and Resilience Skills for Palliative Care Clinicians
Clinicians in any practice setting caring for seriously ill patients and their families are engaged in emotionally demanding work. Practicing self-care and building resilience can help protect against stress and burnout and lead to greater joy and long-term productivity. This 1-hour...
Sharing Serious News
This is an online, self-paced course that will equip you for difficult conversations with clear and effective strategies that improve communication, encourage empathy, and reduce stress for patients, families, and the palliative care team. Earn 2 CE hours.
Social Aspects of Care
Living with serious illness can be stressful for patients and families. Addressing psychosocial distress is critical to supporting patients and families through the journey of serious illness, and delivering quality whole-person care. Explore strategies and skills to assess how patients...
Spiritual, Religious, and Existential Aspects of Care
Living with a serious illness often changes the way individuals experience their world. Faith and spirituality can emerge as important elements of a person’s care plan. This course helps you develop an approach to identify, evaluate, and address spiritual, religious,...
The Business Case for Palliative Care
Palliative care has been shown to improve clinical outcomes, reduce unnecessary readmissions, and lower costs for many hospitals and health systems. Clinical and administrative leaders need a framework for evaluating data that shows how palliative care services impact their organization. Developed...
The Evidence for Nutrition in Palliative Care
Food choices have a significant impact on health and wellbeing at every stage of life. Learn about nutritional therapies in palliative care, including supportive nutrition, nutrition screening vs. assessment, the underlying dynamics of food-drug interactions, and how nutrition affects common...
Understanding Food Choices and Chronic or Complex Illness
Food choices have a significant impact on health and well being at every stage of life. For people with chronic or serious illness, good nutrition is an essential part of holistic palliative care. In this course, you’ll explore the role of...
What Every APRN Needs to Know About Palliative Care
For Nurse Practitioners and Clinical Nurse Specialists, this course ensures you have a foundational understanding of palliative care including conducting advance care planning discussions, assessing palliative care needs, having difficult conversations, and much more.
What Every Chaplain Needs to Know About Palliative Care
Learn effective strategies for incorporating palliative care into your daily practice and understand when to refer a patient to a palliative care expert.
What Every Health Professional Needs to Know About Palliative Care
Learn more about the principles of palliative care, the typical composition of the palliative care team, ways to identify patients who can benefit from palliative care, and key concepts in advance care planning.
What Every Nurse Needs to Know About Palliative Care
This course explores the fundamentals of palliative care and delivers a number of tools and skills to help nurses improve care delivery for patients with serious illness. Learn about goal setting, functional assessments, delivering difficult news, advance care planning, and more.
What Every Physician Needs to Know About Palliative Care
This course provides physicians in primary care with an introduction to palliative care practice, including how to assess the need for palliative care, conducting advance care planning discussions, sharing difficult news, and more.
What Every PA Needs to Know About Palliative Care
This course explores the fundamentals of palliative care and delivers a number of tools to help PAs improve care delivery for patients with serious illnesses. Learn how to assess the need for palliative care, delivering bad news, and understand advance care planning.
What Every Social Worker Needs to Know About Palliative Care
Palliative care is specialized care, an extra level of support for people with serious or chronic illnesses. According to the National Association of Social Workers, most social workers, regardless of practice setting, will at some point work with clients facing...
Working With POLST
Understand the role of the Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment (POLST) process and how to appropriately use it for patients with advanced illnesses.
Palliative Care for Care Managers
Learn the fundamentals of palliative care and enhance skills that help you build stronger and supportive connections with seriously ill patients and their families.
Beyond Cultural Humility: Diversity, Inclusivity, and Navigating Bias in Care
Learners enrolled in this course explore aspects of diversity, equity, and inclusion to develop self-awareness and build professional skills that promote a safe and welcoming workplace environment.
Telemedicine Skills for Clinicians
In the era of COVID-19, the world of healthcare—including palliative care—experienced a sudden shift in how care is delivered: Almost overnight, clinicians across sectors and settings migrated their patient encounters online. As a result, a significant portion of healthcare encounters...
Core Concepts in Palliative Care – All Health Professionals
This course provides all health professionals with a common framework to understand palliative care and equips them with essential tools to implement a unified, holistic, and patient-centered care plan.
Beyond Cultural Humility: Diversity, Inclusivity, and Navigating Bias in Care
Learners enrolled in this course explore aspects of diversity, equity, and inclusion to develop self-awareness and build professional skills that promote a safe and welcoming workplace environment.
Telemedicine Skills for Clinicians
In the era of COVID-19, the world of healthcare—including palliative care—experienced a sudden shift in how care is delivered: Almost overnight, clinicians across sectors and settings migrated their patient encounters online. As a result, a significant portion of healthcare encounters...
Core Concepts in Palliative Care – All Health Professionals
This course provides all health professionals with a common framework to understand palliative care and equips them with essential tools to implement a unified, holistic, and patient-centered care plan.
Core Concepts in Palliative Care – Chaplains
Gain a deeper understanding of the chaplain’s role as a member of an interdisciplinary team and learn more about chaplaincy practices unique to palliative care and seriously ill patients. The All Health Professionals course is included with the Nurse, Social Work, and Chaplain courses, so all team members share common concepts, vocabulary, and approaches.
Core Concepts in Palliative Care – Nurses
Tailored for nursing professionals, this course focuses on the skills and approaches designed to integrate palliative care into the overall care of chronically and seriously ill patients. The All Health Professionals course is included with the Nurse, Social Work, and Chaplain courses, so all team members share common concepts, vocabulary, and approaches.
Core Concepts in Palliative Care – Social Workers
Designed to build on the patient-centered skills and strengths of social workers, this course explores important concepts in the care of seriously ill patients, such as values, ethics, mindfulness, self-care, resilience, death, and grief. The All Health Professionals course is included with the Nurse, Social Work, and Chaplain courses, so all team members share common concepts, vocabulary, and approaches.
Advanced Practice RN Certificate in Palliative Care
Transform your career. Learn evidence-based approaches in pain and symptom management to help support resilience and ease patients’ suffering. Help patients and families identify care goals of care. Build interdisciplinary teams.
Certificate in Clinical Pediatric Palliative Care
This self-paced, online education series explores concepts and strategies integral to pediatric palliative care to help hospice and palliative care clinicians expertly support young patients with serious illnesses and their families.
Core Concepts in Palliative Care – Nurses
Tailored for nursing professionals, this course focuses on the skills and approaches designed to integrate palliative care into the overall care of chronically and seriously ill patients. The All Health Professionals course is included with the Nurse, Social Work, and Chaplain courses, so all team members share common concepts, vocabulary, and approaches.
RN Certificate in Palliative Care
For nurses working in hospice and palliative care or another care setting, this course provides you with the tools you need to better support patients and caregivers. Explore trajectories of common diseases and build expert skills in pain and symptom management, addressing emotional suffering, and caring for patients at the end of life.
What Every APRN Needs to Know About Palliative Care
For Nurse Practitioners and Clinical Nurse Specialists, this course ensures you have a foundational understanding of palliative care including conducting advance care planning discussions, assessing palliative care needs, having difficult conversations, and much more.
What Every Nurse Needs to Know About Palliative Care
This course explores the fundamentals of palliative care and delivers a number of tools and skills to help nurses improve care delivery for patients with serious illness. Learn about goal setting, functional assessments, delivering difficult news, advance care planning, and more.
Advanced Concepts in Easing Suffering and Promoting Healing for Pediatric Patients
This course focuses on some of the most difficult emotional and spiritual aspects of caring for young patients at the end of life, including transference and countertransference, trauma-informed care, types of grief, caring for diverse families, and empowering patients and families in end-of-life decision making.
Advanced Communication Skills for Pediatric Patient and Family Support
Effective communication is a cornerstone of quality palliative care. Communicating effectively with children, teens, and young adults with serious illness, and their families, requires a skilled approach that is attuned to the patient’s developmental age and stage. This course explores topics...
Advanced Pediatric Care Delivery
This course explores the key clinical features of rare complex conditions seen in pediatric hospice and palliative care. Learn how you can help parents advocate for their child while recognizing the limits of medical interventions, and identifying medical and psychosocial...
Advanced Pediatric Pain and Symptom Assessment and Management
Assessing and managing pain is a fundamental part of high quality palliative care. There are important differences to consider when caring for infants, children, teens, or young adults. This self-paced course delivers robust clinical skills aimed at effectively assessing and...
Advanced Practice RN Certificate in Palliative Care
Transform your career. Learn evidence-based approaches in pain and symptom management to help support resilience and ease patients’ suffering. Help patients and families identify care goals of care. Build interdisciplinary teams.
Basic Pediatric Care Delivery
Many children, teens, and young adults with serious or life-limiting illness have been using medical devices since birth. Some pediatric patients may outgrow the need for such devices, while others will remain dependent on them throughout their lives. This course examines...
Basic Pediatric Pain and Symptom Assessment and Management
Assessing and managing pain is a fundamental part of high quality palliative care and it requires a specialized approach when caring for infants, children, teens, or young adults. This course comprises four modules that highlight important considerations and effective clinical...
Care of the Patient at the End of Life
Caring for patients nearing end of life requires an increased level of knowledge and skills. This course delivers evidence-based tools and resources in prognostication, communication, and symptom management, helping you better identify and support these patients and their families. You’ll...
Communication and Advance Care Planning
Effective communication skills are essential to quality healthcare, and especially crucial for providers caring for patients with chronic or serious disease. This course delivers strategies for improving communication with patients and families while reducing barriers to effective communication about diagnosis,...
Communication Strategies for Shared and Informed Decision Making
Learn key strategies to enhance provider-patient communication, how to help patients understand where they are in the disease process, identify care goals, activate shared decision making, and more.
Cultural Aspects of Care
Widely ranging cultural backgrounds are present in most communities and frontline clinicians, including those in primary care and subspecialty practices, must be culturally aware on all levels. Serious illness presents even more complex challenges. This course explores the cultural sensitivity tools,...
Foundational Pediatric Care Delivery
This self-paced course takes a deep dive into the differences between palliative care and hospice, and how they differ for adults and children. It reviews concurrent care for children, including how to identify patients who are eligible, exploring a wide...
Foundational Pediatric Pain and Symptom Assessment and Management
Assessing and managing pain in seriously ill infants, children, teens, or young adults is integral to high quality pediatric palliative care. This 7-hour course highlights key considerations and effective clinical strategies needed to address the physical symptoms of advanced illness...
Integrating Advance Care Planning Into Your Medical Practice
Advance care planning conversations help patients consider and document the treatment choices they would make if they could no longer speak for themselves. Such conversations are a routine part of healthcare, but guiding patients through them takes skill and a...
Integrating Palliative Care into Practice
Providers are responsible for running hectic office practices or specialty offices, seeing large volumes of patients with little time, and serving thousands of patients each year. Developing primary palliative care services can often enhance some care and services already being...
Introduction to Primary Palliative Care
This course delivers a clear and efficient overview of palliative care, how it’s delivered across a variety of settings, and how to identify patients who need it. You’ll explore the evidence base for palliative care, learn to identify common trajectories...
Physical Aspects of Care
This course equips providers in primary care, oncology, hematology, or other practice settings with the latest clinical strategies to effectively assess and manage pain and other distressing symptoms in patients with serious illnesses. It includes in-depth content and guidelines on the...
PA Certificate in Palliative and Serious Illness Care
Learn evidence-based approaches essential to primary palliative care, including communication, advance care planning, prognostication, assessing, and treating common physical symptoms of serious illnesses, care at the end of life, and more.
Primary Palliative Care Skills for Every Provider
Improve patient care, reduce costs, learn when to refer and how to bill for palliative care services. Earn accredited CEs with this evidence-based curriculum series, created specifically for clinicians in all settings who are caring for chronic and seriously ill patients.
Self-Care and Resilience Skills for Palliative Care Clinicians
Clinicians in any practice setting caring for seriously ill patients and their families are engaged in emotionally demanding work. Practicing self-care and building resilience can help protect against stress and burnout and lead to greater joy and long-term productivity. This 1-hour...
Sharing Serious News
This is an online, self-paced course that will equip you for difficult conversations with clear and effective strategies that improve communication, encourage empathy, and reduce stress for patients, families, and the palliative care team. Earn 2 CE hours.
Social Aspects of Care
Living with serious illness can be stressful for patients and families. Addressing psychosocial distress is critical to supporting patients and families through the journey of serious illness, and delivering quality whole-person care. Explore strategies and skills to assess how patients...
Spiritual, Religious, and Existential Aspects of Care
Living with a serious illness often changes the way individuals experience their world. Faith and spirituality can emerge as important elements of a person’s care plan. This course helps you develop an approach to identify, evaluate, and address spiritual, religious,...
What Every Physician Needs to Know About Palliative Care
This course provides physicians in primary care with an introduction to palliative care practice, including how to assess the need for palliative care, conducting advance care planning discussions, sharing difficult news, and more.
What Every PA Needs to Know About Palliative Care
This course explores the fundamentals of palliative care and delivers a number of tools to help PAs improve care delivery for patients with serious illnesses. Learn how to assess the need for palliative care, delivering bad news, and understand advance care planning.
Core Concepts in Palliative Care – Chaplains
Gain a deeper understanding of the chaplain’s role as a member of an interdisciplinary team and learn more about chaplaincy practices unique to palliative care and seriously ill patients. The All Health Professionals course is included with the Nurse, Social Work, and Chaplain courses, so all team members share common concepts, vocabulary, and approaches.
Essentials of Palliative Care Chaplaincy
Master the full-circle model of spiritual care in this 8-week, instructor-led course. Learn to support patient goals and quality of life, manage physical and spiritual pain, practice cultural humility, support religious differences, and more.
What Every Chaplain Needs to Know About Palliative Care
Learn effective strategies for incorporating palliative care into your daily practice and understand when to refer a patient to a palliative care expert.
Beyond Cultural Humility: Diversity, Inclusivity, and Navigating Bias in Care
Learners enrolled in this course explore aspects of diversity, equity, and inclusion to develop self-awareness and build professional skills that promote a safe and welcoming workplace environment.
Excellence in Interprofessional Palliative Care Documentation
Explore discipline-specific and team-focused strategies for ensuring that your documentation facilitates communication and supports effective and productive relationships within the team and referral sources. If you are looking to build a more cohesive team and improve documentation and referral processes,...
Telemedicine Skills for Clinicians
In the era of COVID-19, the world of healthcare—including palliative care—experienced a sudden shift in how care is delivered: Almost overnight, clinicians across sectors and settings migrated their patient encounters online. As a result, a significant portion of healthcare encounters...
Self-Care and Resilience
Self-care and building resilience is essential for clinicians working with seriously ill patients—it guards against burnout, moral distress, and team dysfunction. This course provides practical tools and resources to help healthcare professionals recognize the warning signs of moral distress, identify...
Applying Motivational Interviewing Techniques and Interventions in Palliative Care
Gain a deeper understanding of motivational interviewing techniques and explore ways to integrate this method into your work with patients.
Aromatherapy in Palliative Care
Aromatherapy, or the use of essential oils to promote well-being, has a growing base of research in modern health care. Learn how aromatherapy can support palliative care patients and their families.
Basic Communication Skills for Pediatric Patient and Family Support
Hospice and palliative care professionals work with many types of families in crisis and grief. Yet, even experienced clinicians may feel anxious when delivering care to infants, children, teens, or young adults. This course describes the challenges and joys of communicating...
Basic Concepts of Easing Suffering and Promoting Healing for Pediatric Patients
The progressive illness and/or impending death of an infant, child, teen, or young adult can cause profound grief in the patient as well as the family. This course focuses on supporting those who are grieving and explores the importance of...
Billing for Advance Care Planning Conversations
This online course explores strategies to encourage patient participation in advance care planning conversations. Case studies illustrate how Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes are used in various scenarios, followed by an interactive exercise to help students apply the knowledge learned...
Core Concepts in Palliative Care – All Health Professionals
This course provides all health professionals with a common framework to understand palliative care and equips them with essential tools to implement a unified, holistic, and patient-centered care plan.
Effective Advance Care Planning Fundamentals
Advance care planning empowers patients to identify what gives their life meaning and articulate the kind of healthcare treatments they would want, or not want, if a catastrophic event or illness leaves them unable to speak for themselves. This course provides...
Facilitating an Advance Care Planning Conversation
This 1-hour course delivers strategies for conducting advance care planning discussions with patients and families by focusing on their goals and what matters most to them. Learn when and how to confidently begin advance care planning conversations, and apply concepts and skills through interactive activities.
Food is Medicine Series – Nutrition in Palliative Care
Good nutrition is an essential part of holistic palliative care. This self-paced series explores the latest research, and teaches practical skills and approaches for using nutrition to improve quality of life at any stage of illness.
Foundational Communication Skills for Pediatric Patient and Family Support
In pediatric palliative care, honest, respectful, and open communication is essential to supporting children, teens, and young adults and their families, and to providing quality, compassionate care. This course explores how to determine the right time for an initial home visit...
Foundational Concepts of Easing Suffering and Promoting Healing for Pediatric Patients
The progressive illness or impending death of an infant, child, teen, or young adult can cause profound grief in the patient as well as the family. This self-paced online course prepares hospice and palliative care professionals to recognize and address...
Healing Through Art
Learn how creative self-expression promotes healing and how to guide others in art activities that help them ease anxiety, process grief, and build resilience.
Introduction to Pediatric Palliative Care
Pediatric palliative care differs from palliative care for adults, especially as the end of life approaches. These differences affect not only patients and families, but the hospice and palliative care professionals delivering care. This course introduces you to the challenges, benefits,...
Multidisciplinary Certificate in Pediatric Palliative Care
While palliative care is designed to ease suffering in patients at any age and stage of serious illness, caring for pediatric patients differs significantly from palliative care for adults and requires an extra level of skill. Designed for social workers, chaplains,...
Palliative Care for Care Managers
Learn the fundamentals of palliative care and enhance skills that help you build stronger and supportive connections with seriously ill patients and their families.
Pediatric Ethical Principles and Challenges
Ethics play an important role in all areas of healthcare and can present unique challenges in pediatric palliative care where healthcare decision making and family dynamics may be more complex. These factors, and the emotional toll of caring for a...
Pediatric Team Support
Interdisciplinary teams are the cornerstone of palliative care, but can be vulnerable to challenges that arise when patients experience intense suffering caused by serious or life-limiting illness. Those issues can be heightened when the patient is a child, creating fear...
The Business Case for Palliative Care
Palliative care has been shown to improve clinical outcomes, reduce unnecessary readmissions, and lower costs for many hospitals and health systems. Clinical and administrative leaders need a framework for evaluating data that shows how palliative care services impact their organization. Developed...
The Evidence for Nutrition in Palliative Care
Food choices have a significant impact on health and wellbeing at every stage of life. Learn about nutritional therapies in palliative care, including supportive nutrition, nutrition screening vs. assessment, the underlying dynamics of food-drug interactions, and how nutrition affects common...
Understanding Food Choices and Chronic or Complex Illness
Food choices have a significant impact on health and well being at every stage of life. For people with chronic or serious illness, good nutrition is an essential part of holistic palliative care. In this course, you’ll explore the role of...
What Every Health Professional Needs to Know About Palliative Care
Learn more about the principles of palliative care, the typical composition of the palliative care team, ways to identify patients who can benefit from palliative care, and key concepts in advance care planning.
Working With POLST
Understand the role of the Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment (POLST) process and how to appropriately use it for patients with advanced illnesses.
