Primary Palliative Care Skills For Physicians/NPs/PAs
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The Primary Palliative Care Skills series of online courses will help you improve patient care, reduce costs, know when to refer, and how to bill for palliative care services. Take the entire series of nine courses or create your own repertoire based on your needs. You’ll earn accredited CEs or CMEs with this cost-effective, convenient, evidence-based series, created specifically for the primary care clinician caring for chronic and seriously ill patients. “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 effort” Mike Rabow, MD, Professor of Clinical Medicine in the Division of General Internal Medicine, Department of Medicine, at the University of California, San Francisco |
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What You’ll Learn
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What You’ll Earn
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.
Courses
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Course Authors
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.
Completion and Refunds
In order to complete this course and obtain a certificate, you must view the course in its entirety, correctly answer all case studies and quiz/test questions (as appropriate) and complete the evaluation. You will have 90 days to access this course from the date of purchase. No refunds are given for self-paced courses.