Primary Palliative Care for Clinicians

Primary Palliative Care Skills

For Physicians, NPs, and PAs

The following Primary Palliative Care Skills online courses are perfect for physicians, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants that want to improve patient care, reduce costs, know when to refer, and how to bill for palliative care services. Participants earn CMEs or CEs with this cost-effective, convenient, evidence-based series, created specifically for the primary care clinician caring for chronic and seriously ill patients.

Medi-Cal Providers!

You may qualify to get some of this training at no charge through special funding by the California Department of Health Care Services (DHCS). Learn more here.

This curriculum allows all physicians caring for patients with serious illness to expand their level of comfort and efficiency with some of the most important parts of care—symptom management and communication around difficult topics. All of us need to be able to do the basics and without wasting any time or effortMike Rabow, MD, Professor of Clinical Medicine in the Division of General Internal Medicine, Department of Medicine, at the University of California, San Francisco

Why Take These Courses?

The ultimate outcome of taking these courses is improving chronic and serious illness care. Palliative care has been demonstrated, in numerous clinical studies, to improve quality of life, reduce suffering, and more closely align with stated preferences for those patients. While palliative care services are growing, they are not keeping pace with the needs of our aging population.

What’s in the Courses?

Concepts explored include prognostication, advance care planning, physical aspects of care, self-care and resilience, care at the end of life, and psychosocial, spiritual and cultural care. You will also learn the business aspects of palliative care such as billing and performance measures.

Join the Interest List and get the Brochure on this Series!

Our courses are built for the clinician who wants new knowledge and practical skills that can be immediately applied. Unlike webinar trainings, these courses are highly interactive, very engaging, created by acknowledged experts in palliative and family medicine, and founded on current research and evidence-based practice. They are designed to maximize knowledge transfer, engage you with interactive and memorable content, and provide fresh material relevant to your primary care practice.

This Curriculum will Equip Primary Care Learners to:

• Identify patients who need and could benefit from palliative care
• Effectively communicate with seriously ill patients about their disease trajectory, using prognostication tools and resources
• Assess and treat the most common physical symptoms of serious disease, including pain and nausea
• Identify spiritual and psychosocial distress and connect patients with community resources
• Recognize cultural differences and practice radical respect when treating patients with serious illness
• Integrate palliative care services into a primary care practice
• Use self-care strategies to build resilience and avoid burnout
• Establish billing processes and performance measures for palliative care services

How Much Time Will They Take?

We recognize your time is extremely limited, so we’ve formatted this series for efficiency. Courses vary in length from 1.5 to 8 content hours. They are accessible 24/7 and work with your tight schedule. You can take them at any time and start and stop at your convenience.

To be efficient with your time, here are your options:

• Take a single-topic course to focus on a specific skill
• Take several related courses to achieve greater confidence in a category
• Take the entire series for a more in-depth understanding of palliative care

What Will You Miss if You Don’t Take These Courses?

You’ll miss an opportunity to…

• Utilize new evidence-based skills
• Discover new tools that benefit your practice and your patients
• Enhance relationships with patients facing chronic and serious illness
• Reduce patient litigation, irritation, and frustration through improved communication skills
• Earn affordable CME or CE hours
• Grow your practice while improving patient outcomes

Series Information

Courses

The entire series must be completed to receive a course certificate recognizing CE hours/CME credits.

Introduction to Primary Palliative Care

This course is comprised of three modules that provide an overview of palliative care, how is it delivered across a variety of settings and how to identify individuals who could benefit from it. Through case studies and interactive exercises, you will explore prognostication for disease trajectories in which palliative care can augment treatment plans, and examine methods of prognostication, and the benefits and barriers that are encountered.

Learn More About Introduction to Primary Palliative Care

Communication and Advance Care Planning

Effective provider-patient communication is key to both primary care and palliative care. This course provides strategies to enhance communication with patients and families facing serious illness, while reducing barriers to effective communication about diagnosis, prognosis and serious illness. You will build understanding and skills in advance care planning, incorporating use of evidence-based techniques for conducting difficult conversations, and legally binding forms to aid in documentation.

Learn More About Communication and Advance Care Planning

Physical Aspects of Care

Primary care clinicians are increasingly encountering patients with complex co-morbidities who still rely on the primary care practice as their medical home. This course highlights the wide range of physical symptoms encountered in serious illness; lays out treatment strategies, including effective pain management; and examines the follow-up required for symptom management within these practice settings. Emergency conditions in palliative care are also addressed.

Learn More About Physical Aspects of Care

Psychosocial Aspects of Care

Living with serious illness can be stressful for patients and families, creating psychosocial distress that impacts health and quality of life. This course provides assessment tools that will help primary care clinicians determine how a patient is processing disease management and prognosis, adapting to changes in functional status, or coping with the burdens of the condition or the prospect of dying. Social supports that can address these areas of distress are also explored.

Learn More About Psychosocial Aspects of Care

Spiritual Aspects of Care

This course introduces a framework for clinicians to recognize the ways in which belief systems affect a patient or family living with a life-threatening illness. It helps clinicians develop an approach to identify, evaluate, and address spiritual, religious, and existential concerns, and presents assessment tools, strategies for coping, and referral guidelines to intertwine quality healthcare with spiritual care.

Learn More About Spiritual Aspects of Care

Cultural Aspects of Care

Rarely is a primary care practice today made up of homogenous populations. Widely ranging cultural backgrounds are present in most communities, so providers are challenged to be culturally aware on all levels. Serious illness and terminal illness present even more complex challenges. This course gives providers cultural sensitivity, tools, suggestions, and approaches for patients and their loved ones during stressful illness.

Learn More About Cultural Aspects of Care

Care of the Patient at the End of Life

The four modules in this course provide tools for prognostication of disease progression, and care needed during the continuum. Standards regarding hospice eligibility, coverage and admission are included, along with information to help providers and patients select appropriate, high-quality services. Signs and symptoms of impending death will be covered, as well as ethics for patients nearing the end of life.

Learn More About Care of the Patient at the End of Life

Integrating Palliative Care into Practice

Providing palliative care support in a primary care setting is a practice decision, but also a business decision. This course will help you develop the business case for palliative care, including forecasting the patient pool and resources needed, achieving acceptance, measuring outcomes, and establishing reimbursement processes. 

Learn More About Integrating Palliative Care into Practice

Self-Care and Resilience

Self-care and building resilience is essential to combat burnout, moral distress, and team dysfunction, particularly when providing care to seriously ill patients. This course equips clinicians to recognize the warning signs of moral distress, identify their own beliefs and habits that may lead to burn-out or compassion fatigue, and utilize tools for self-care and resilience-building.

Learn More About Self-Care and Resilience

Fast Facts

Begins:	Online courses are available immediately upon registration
Location:	Completely online, available 24/7
Offers:	34 CE hours OR Click HERE for CME Credit Info*
Costs:	$999
Requires:	Computing skills sufficient to complete graduate work, access to a computer with an Internet connection.
Is ideal for:	Physicians, Physician Assistants, Nurse Practitioners
Detailed FAQ:	Click HERE.
Cancellation Policy:	There are no refunds on our self-paced courses

Series Information

Additional Details

Continuing Medical Education Accreditation

American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP): This Enduring Material activity, Primary Palliative Care Skills, has been reviewed and is acceptable for credit by the American Academy of Family Physicians. Term of approval begins 02/23/2018. Term of approval is for one year from this date. Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.

Approved for 34 AAFP Prescribed credits.

American Medical Association Physician Recognition Award (AMA PRA): This activity has been planned and implemented in accordance with the accreditation requirements and policies of the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) through the joint providership of The Doctors Company and the California State University Institute for Palliative Care. The Doctors Company is accredited by the ACCME to provide continuing medical education for physicians.

The Doctors Company designates this enduring material for a maximum of 34 AMA PRA Category 1 Credits™. Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.

Course Authors

This curriculum was conceptualized and developed with the oversight, guidance and direction of expert leaders in primary care and palliative care across a wide range of disciplines. They are:

Mike Rabow, MD – Dr. Rabow is the Director of Symptom Management Service Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, Associate Director University of California Medical Center Palliative Care Leadership Center.

Sarah Adkins, MD – Dr. Adkins is a board-certified palliative medicine physician who practices both inpatient and outpatient palliative care at the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Scott Endsley, MD – Dr. Endsley is a palliative care consulting physician, Concord, California.

Leah Morris, RN, MPH, MS, NP – Ms. Morris is a registered nurse and nurse practitioner representing the Coalition for Compassionate Care of California.

Mike Witte, MD – Dr. Witte is Vice President and Chief Medical Officer, California Primary Care Association.

Shelly Rodrigues, CAE, FACEHP – Ms. Rodrigues is Deputy Executive Vice President, California Academy of Family Physicians.

James Mittelberger, MD, MPH, FAAHPM – Dr. Mittelberger is Clinical Professor of Medicine at UCSF School of Medicine and Chief Medical Officer at Hospice by the Bay.

Anne Kinderman, MD – Dr. Kinderman is Director of Supportive and Palliative Care Service UCSF School of Medicine and San Francisco General Hospital.

Monique Parrish, DrPH, MPH, LCSW – Ms. Parrish is the Founder and Director of LifeCourse Strategies.

Jamie Beachy, PhD, MDiv – Dr. Beachy is a Certified Educator (ACPE).

Rebekah Halpern, PA-C – Ms. Halpern is a physician assistant Long Beach Memorial Hospital.

Michael Fratkin, MD – Dr. Fratkin is President and Founder, ResolutionCare.

Holli Martinez, FNP, BC, ACHPN, FPCN – Ms. Martinez is the Palliative Care Service Program Director at the University of Utah.

John Morris, MD, FAAHPM – Dr. Morris is Chief Medical Officer Palliative Care, Four Seasons and Teleios Collaborative Network. 

Series Information