(PO-028) (PO-028) Care until the End: A Curriculum for End-of-life Psychiatry
Multiple arguments have been made in support of further involvement of psychiatrists in the care of patients at the end of life or with terminal diagnoses. A recent study shows that training opportunities in end-of-life care were lacking for psychiatry trainees within the US. Another study indicated that less than half of consultation-liaison (C-L) psychiatry fellowship programs offer fellows formal opportunities for interaction with palliative care fellows, and revealed a wide discrepancy in the depth and content of palliative care training. Similarly, the literature brings up arguments for palliative psychiatry, which involves adopting a palliative approach in managing persistent mental illness for psychiatric patients at risk of iatrogenic harm by current treatment paradigms. This model curriculum is designed to educate psychiatry trainees on the management of new-onset psychiatric illness at the end of life and chronic psychiatric conditions in patients at the end of their lives. No published model curricula addresses this need in psychiatry trainees. Our proposed curriculum includes discussion-based and experiential learning, with the goal of increasing trainee comfort in the psychiatric management of such important patient populations.
Learning Objectives:
Readers will be able to describe the need for further educating psychiatry trainees in addressing end-of-life concerns.
Readers will appraise a proposed curriculum for meeting such a need.
Readers will review concepts in end-of-life education that they can bring to their training programs and/ or C-L work