Small But Mighty: 5 Lessons from Smaller Teams Delivering High-Quality Palliative Care

High-quality palliative care isn’t defined by program size or budget—it’s defined by consistency, collaboration, and a shared commitment to patients and families. Across the country, smaller palliative care programs are demonstrating what’s possible when teams focus on training, teamwork, and outcomes that matter.

In summer 2025, CAPC spoke with twenty smaller organizations—community hospitals, critical access hospitals, independent hospices, and small practice groups serving fewer than 150 beds—to understand how they sustain their commitment to high-quality palliative care. Their experiences highlight what makes these programs effective: clear structures, intentional learning, and a deep sense of accountability to their communities.

Throughout the summer, we heard inspiring stories and recurring themes from small but highly effective palliative care programs. By sharing these successes, we hope to spark ideas and inspiration for others looking to revitalize their programs.

For smaller teams, consistency is everything. With limited staff and shifting roles, having a structured onboarding and education plan helps ensure that every clinician, social worker, case manager, and trainee shares the common foundation in communication skills, pain and symptom management, and serious illness care.

Mapping essential competencies to a short list of required courses gives new staff a clear starting point and reinforces shared standards across disciplines.

Many smaller programs are adopting “micro-learning” strategies—short, frequent touchpoints that reinforce skills and sustain engagement.

Some teams are sending out weekly “Monday Minutes”, organization-wide emails with medication pearls or communication tips, and creating shared folders stocked with reference sheets, algorithms, and short case studies. These low-effort, high-impact practices keep education active without requiring extensive resources.

When smaller programs run into questions—about billing, wound care protocols, or new workflows—they often turn to peers who have already solved similar challenges.

Connecting with CAPC faculty and palliative care professionals throughout the country—through CAPC Circles, Virtual Office Hours, Webinars, and Interprofessional Grand Rounds—help teams crowdsource answers and apply solutions right away.

Small programs rely on curated CAPC policy/legislative updates, so they don’t have to track every rule change themselves. “If it’s important, it will show up in our inbox,” one ER case manager said.

Every leader we spoke with described the need to show return on investment. Smaller organizations are disciplined about demonstrating value—using CAPC tools to measure program performance and demonstrate value, and tracking training completions, CE credits earned, onboarding time, and staff confidence to justify CAPC membership.

Some present these metrics in simple “value decks” for leadership, linking training and team performance to patient experience, retention, or compliance measures.

Smaller organizations are engines of innovation. Without large grants or donor backing, these teams innovate out of necessity: standardizing onboarding, sharing materials across disciplines, co-teaching with peers, and adopting low-cost, high-impact tools to meet patient and caregiver needs.

CAPC membership supports this ingenuity in the background—accelerating training, offering ready-to-use educational materials, and connecting teams to a national learning community. But the real drivers are the clinicians, coordinators, and leaders at the bedside who adapt these tools to their local realities.

It’s important to note that these small organizations were selected in part due to their high utilization of CAPC resources. We were curious to know which tools and technical assistance made the biggest difference in building their strong, effective programs.

Below are a few simple, high-impact ideas—already included in your CAPC membership—that you can easily put into practice to reenergize your team and strengthen your commitment to high-quality palliative care.

• Embed essential training in onboarding. Keep the list short; prioritize skills that will improve patient care on day one.
• Use Training Assignments to assign/track completions and link courses to your learning management system (LMS) without a new software purchase.
• Align training with requirements. Meet CE/MOC/regulatory needs with included credits to reduce external spending. (For instance, clinicians can fulfill the MATE training requirement by taking CAPC’s DEA 8-Hour Opioid and Substance Use Disorder Training)
• Create a micro-learning cadence. Send weekly 5-minute emails with one clickable resource for just-in-time refreshers.
• Stock a point-of-care library. Save reference sheets and algorithms where clinicians actually click, whether that’s on your team’s share drive, internet, or another location.
• Lean on peers. Crowd source questions and seek examples in CAPC Circles; adapt answers to your setting the same week.
• Show the value upstairs. Pair usage data with a one-page outcomes snapshot to justify costs and protect the program as a line item.
• Share your story: Celebrate your program’s successes with your palliative care and administrative teams and engage with the CAPC Community to identify opportunities for new resources.

The members we spoke with reminded us that smaller organizations aren’t doing less—they’re doing more with focus. Their feedback has been instrumental in shaping how CAPC evolves to meet the needs of teams of every size. In 2026, we’re:

• Adding key takeaway resource documents to every webinar and Interprofessional Grand Rounds
• Developing new content based directly on member feedback—starting with a palliative wound care Interprofessional Grand Rounds suggested by a member during outreach
• Highlighting underused features, like CAPC Training Assignments and data exports to help programs measure engagement and demonstrate value
• And refining CAPC Virtual Office Hours to strengthen peer-to-peer learning through virtual events and open feedback loops with members

We’ll continue listening—because the best ideas come from the field.

Smaller palliative care programs are proving that high-quality care doesn’t depend on scale and large budgets (though the latter is always nice!)—it depends on structure, creativity, and a shared commitment to patients and families. These leaders are shaping the future of the field by showing that thoughtful, consistent education and teamwork can deliver impact that lasts.

Edited by Melissa Baron. Clinical review by Andrew Esch, MD, MBA.