37 Teaching about dying: supporting non-specialist educators to teach about dying and palliative care within undergraduate medical education
Year: 2025
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Introduction Undergraduate palliative care teaching is often variable or absent. Medical students lack exposure to dying patients, and experience negative attitudes towards end of life care. This can lead to junior doctors being unprepared to care for dying patients. Increasing the involvement of non-specialists in palliative care teaching can improve integration of palliative care into undergraduate medical curricula and improve learning. We developed a novel workshop to support non-specialist clinical education fellows (CEFs) at Warwick Hospital to incorporate dying and end of life care into their undergraduate medical teaching. Methods The voluntary workshop was delivered to the CEF cohort in October 2024. Pre- and post-workshop anonymous questionnaires were used to assess pre-existing attitudes towards teaching about dying, and assess outcomes. Results 8 CEFs attended the teaching. All CEFs recognised the importance of teaching about dying both pre- and post-workshop. However pre-workshop, CEFs rated their own capability to do this as 3/5 on average, and their knowledge of relevant resources as on average 2.6/5. In Post-workshop questionnaire free-text responses, CEFs reported increased confidence teaching about dying, more awareness of relevant resources, and intentions to integrate dying and end of life care into future teaching. Conclusions We demonstrated that providing targeted education for non-specialist educators can improve their confidence to teach about dying and end of life care, giving them the tools to integrate these topics into their teaching. Our next goal is to demonstrate the value of this training with a wider range and breadth of educators and sites, and to better understand any possible pre-session self-selection bias that occurred due to the voluntary nature of this workshop. We hope that this will contribute to improved medical student learning about dying and palliative care and to the development of junior doctors who are better able to care for dying patients.
Source: Poster presentations
Authors: Rachel Hughes, Jennifer Paskins, Kate Hoddell
Institution: Warwick Hospital
Language: English
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4408550743