Additional Skills for Social Workers Who Focus Primarily on Supporting People with Serious Illness
This Learning Pathway contains a comprehensive set of training and tools to help social workers who focus primarily on supporting people with serious illness address the unique needs of patients and families. Clinical topics include assessing patient needs and concerns, understanding patients’ goals for care, addressing symptom burden, and helping patients to avoid crises and plan for the future.
Assess the Needs and Concerns of Patients
An introduction to palliative care, how it is delivered, its impact on quality of life, and the growing population of patients who need it.
Assesses for nine symptoms experienced by patients with serious illness and quantifies their severity. Alberta Health Services.
Brief (4-question) screening tool for anxiety and depression.
Assessment questions to help nurses understand the impact of serious illness on a patient's relationships, social and spiritual supports, financial stability, and trust in the health care system. Fast Facts, April 2020
Assessment tool and resource list to address social risk factors.
Self-reported caregiver assessment.
Checklist of triggers for referral to a specialty palliative care team.
Strengthen the Clinician-Patient Relationship and Understand Care Goals
Learn best practices for having patient-centered conversations about a serious illness diagnosis.
Learn how to effectively discuss prognosis with patients and their caregivers.
Learn best practices for building trust, eliciting patient values, and having patient-centered conversations about goals of care.
Learn to effectively lead meetings that help patients and caregivers become aligned around the patient’s goals.
Learn techniques to help patients and their caregivers plan for the future, both during the early stages of a serious illness and as a disease progresses.
Defines unconscious bias and how it influences patient care, and provides ways to reduce the impact of unconscious bias on care delivery.
This resource lists step-wise tips to foster comfortable, productive dialogue for ‘the hospice conversation’.
Manage Pain and Symptoms
Conducting a comprehensive pain assessment to guide safe and effective treatment.
Recommended validated cognitive assessment tools.
This online course teaches how to accurately identify and treat depression in patients living with a serious illness.
Take this online course to learn evidence-based strategies to identify and treat anxiety in patients with a serious illness.
Prevent Crises and Help Patients Plan Ahead
Considerations for clinicians, patients, and families upon diagnosis, including advance care planning, personal care needs, legal and financial planning, work and retirement planning, and prevention of common medical risks.
This course provides context and best practices for identifying older adults at risk for poor outcomes, including falls, delirium, and caregiving challenges.
Assessing and supporting caregivers of people with serious illness.
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