Palliative Care and COVID-19

 

The COVID-19 pandemic presents a severe healthcare crisis. Those most at risk from the virus — the elderly, frail, and/or those with underlying serious health problems — are the exact patient population that palliative care is designed to serve. At the CSU Shiley Institute for Palliative Care, our concern and commitment to them and to you, the professionals caring for them, is at the forefront of all we do.   To help you quickly build basic palliative care skills and better serve patients and families affected by this crisis, we have many affordable courses and free resources available to support you.

COVID-19 Care Is Palliative Care

The many strengths of palliative care — communication, advance care planning, pain and symptom management, and psychosocial/spiritual support — are needed now more than ever.

Our self-paced and instructor-led online courses reflects those themes and give bedside, acute-care and/or community-based clinicians effective strategies they can immediately integrate into practice to ease suffering, improve communication, facilitate healthcare decision-making, and build resilience.

Find some free resources below. To learn how our courses can help you and your organization, email us at palliativecare@csusm.edu or call 760-750-4006. 

Please bookmark this page and check back often. New courses and resources will be added as they become available.

Free eBooks

• Mindfulness and Its Meaning in Palliative Care
• Coping With Moral Distress: A Guide for Healthcare Providers Caring for Patients With Serious Illness
• Advance Care Planning: A Guide for Healthcare Professionals
• The Power of Words: The Importance of Defining and Documenting Patient-Centered Care
• The Five Trajectories: Supporting Patients During Serious Illness
• The Whole Person Plan: A Tool to Guide APRNs in Palliative Care Discussions and Assessments

Free Telemedicine Training Videos

Learn practical tips and strategies for using telemedicine to connect with patients in any practice setting in these one-hour free videos featuring experts in telehealth and serious illness care. These recordings are a series of open forums hosted by the Institute in Spring 2020 and made possible with support from the California Health Care Foundation.

Watch telemedicine pioneers Michael Fratkin, MD, and Brian Mistler, PhD, of ResolutionCare Network, and the Institute’s Executive Director Jennifer Ballentine, MA, facilitate each of these sessions:

Session 1: Effectiveness and Connection via Telemedicine: Getting Past the (Real and Imagined) Hurdles
Featuring Michael Fratkin, MD, Brian Mistler, PhD, and Jennifer Ballentine, MA

Session 2: Expert Q&A on Symptom Management and Patient Education at a Distance
Featuring Mike Rabow, MD, FAAHPM, Professor of Clinical Medicine, and Associate Chief of Education & Mentoring in the Division of Palliative Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

Session 3: Virtually Anything in COVID-19: The Many Uses of Technology for Caring
Featuring Dana Lustbader, MD, FAAHPM, Division Chief of Palliative Medicine at ProHEALTH in New York.

Session 4: Best Practices for Hosting Sensitive Conversations by Video
Featuring Brook Calton, MD, MHS, a palliative care specialist, program developer, and educator at UCSF Medical Center Division of Palliative Medicine.

Session 5: Boundaries and Intimacy: How We Can Connect Deeply at a Distance
Featuring Judy Long, MA, MS, a palliative care chaplain with UCSF’s Symptom Management Service and UCSF’s Parkinson’s Disease Supportive Care Clinic.

Session 6: Emergency Medicine, Nursing Home Residents, and Tele-Palliative Care: Past, Present, and Future
Featuring Claritza Rios, MD, a physician leader in Northern California with extensive experience in emergency medicine, telemedicine, and palliative care.

Affordable Self-Paced Courses

Advance Care Planning and Documentation

These self-paced online courses deliver key advance care planning skills so you can empower patients now to decide what kind of care they would want if they could no longer speak for themselves. You’ll learn to integrate, facilitate, and bill for advance care planning conversations in any practice setting.

Strategies for Difficult Conversations

Courses in our Communication Skills for Clinicians series will help you increase clarity, empathy, and understanding in your conversations with patients and other members of the healthcare team. Learn how to share difficult news and how to help patients and families make informed decisions about treatment and care.

Introductions to Palliative Care

These 1-hour courses give an essential overview of palliative care including what it entails, how it differs from hospice, and who might benefit from it. Find the course that fits your discipline and learn how you can better support your patients with serious illnesses.

Primary Palliative Care

This self-paced series, Primary Palliative Care Skills, features 9 courses for clinicians in any healthcare setting who have patients with chronic illness or frailty. You’ll learn to improve communication, pain and symptom management, psychosocial and spiritual aspects of care, care at the end of life, and more. Choose individual courses or the full series.

Crisis Intervention and Management

This course features two modules that can help you defuse and manage high-stress situations in health care, including conflict, personal crises, natural disasters, or other emergencies. Designed for hospital care managers, the lessons are applicable to any provider.

Self-Care and Resilience

Stress can lead to burnout, which hurts your mental and physical health and negatively affects the people you care for. This course gives you great evidence-based tools and practical strategies for easing stress, boosting resilience, and improving your well-being, resulting in better job satisfaction and patient care.

Building Palliative Care Team Skills

These Core Concepts in Palliative Care courses are designed to get all members of your palliative care team functioning at the top of their license. Courses target each discipline – nursing, social work, and chaplaincy – and cover essential palliative care concepts such as effective communication; managing suffering and spiritual distress; coping with death, loss and grief; and bolstering self-care and resiliency.

Palliative Care for Adolescents and Children

Earn your certificate in Pediatric Palliative Care. These courses build basic, foundational, and advanced skills in caring for young patients with serious illnesses and their families. Learn age-appropriate communication strategies, therapeutic approaches in caring for children, teens, and young adults, pain and symptom management, and more.