Strategies used to educate a large hospital on Palliative Care.

Short Description

Our hospital system made a commitment to educate health care providers of all disciplines in all venues of care to improve the skills, confidence and competency in palliative and end-of-life care. Some steps we took to achieve this goal include:

• Developed a multi-disciplinary education work group charged with creating and implementing a three-year action plan.
• Implemented and evaluated yearly “train-the-trainer” sessions to include key clinical and administrative personnel. These sessions are unique to our system, but deeply rooted in nationally validated and sound palliative care educational curricula, including, ELNEC, EPEC and APPEAL (A Progressive Palliative Care Education Curriculum for care of the African Americans at Life’s End). The training has resulted in approximately 40 palliative care champions throughout St. John Hospital certified to train associates, act as advocates for palliative care and provide resources to their unit/department. Additionally, these champions trained approximately 200 associates on basic palliative care principles and practice.
• Developed and implemented a half-day conference focused on the care of the Pediatric, Neonatal and Perinatal palliative care population with approximately 100 associates attending.
• Created a monthly palliative care lunch and learn series utilizing current palliative care team members as well as national speakers. These sessions average approximately 60 participants each and include: RN’s, social workers, patient care associates, dieticians, physical therapists, spiritual care providers, administrators and physicians.
• Present palliative care topics during physician grand rounds and resident noon conferences on an ongoing basis.
• Developed and implemented a four-hour basic palliative care education program for all St. John Hospital chaplains. Subsequently, an expectation was added to their job description ensuring yearly palliative care training.
• Created monthly palliative care topics for the hospital system’s newsletter to raise awareness and dispel common myths about palliative care.
• Sponsored ten key associates to attend APPEAL to gain a greater knowledge and understanding of the needs of African American’s at the end-of-life.
• Created podcasts of various presentations on palliative care.
• Integrated palliative care topics into existing education such as, new hire orientation and RN mandatory education day.
• Created palliative care educational scholarships for associates to attend local and national conferences.

Summary of Results (What Worked and Why)

Through all of the educational efforts an estimated 1000 St. John Health associates have been exposed to basic palliative care training. Evaluation data revels these efforts have resulted in an increased knowledge and awareness around palliative and end-of-life care.

Lessons learned were

• Ongoing education is a key to culture change
• Evaluation data is valuable to the improvement of educational programs
• Pre and posttest results proved to be a good measure of participant’s knowledge gained from training program.
• If you build it they will come
  • Lunch and Learn sessions are well received with high attendance
• Education builds engagement – reveals and grows palliative care champions
• Curriculum development and delivery is very time-consuming
• Providing education for physicians is very challenging. Like physicians across the country, St. John Health physicians prefer physician-only education as noted by the small number of attendance to various offered programs.