Curriculum

Hospice and Palliative Fellows experience a broad range of educational opportunities in several formats including:

Palliative Core Didactics Small Group Sessions:

On Monday afternoons, the fellows attend didactics on key Palliative Care topics and other aspects of serious illness care. Teaching occurs in a small group format taught by faculty across Palliative Care, Geriatrics, Neurology, Hematology & Oncology, Radiation Oncology, Pediatrics, Psychology, Psychiatry, Quality Improvement, Ethics, and more. Fellows also have a 2 week orientation with core topics in symptom management and communication prior to starting clinical rotations. Some of the special curricular threads throughout the year include addiction, pain management, career development, medical teaching, and sustainable practice.

Communication Skills Workshops:

Fellows participate in skills-based sessions with simulated patients and faculty facilitators to get targeted feedback on their communication skills, practice delivering prognosis, responding to emotion, and how to shift conversations as situations evolve. All faculty facilitators have undergone VitalTalk facilitator training. Fellows also receive training in the Serious Illness Care Program during their orientation. In fall 2024, our fellows became the first trainees across Stanford Health Care to become trainers for the Serious Illness Care program to teach communication skills across Stanford Health. They teach workships throughout the year, and will be teaching serious illness communication skills to all the incoming internal medicine interns during orientation in July 2025. 

Sustainable Practice Series:

Our sustainable practice series is co-led by our interdisciplinary team members in social work and spiritual care, to provide a confidential space for fellows to debrief, learn about trauma informed care, process their own life transitions, and to cultivate skills to practice hospice and palliative medicine in a sustainable way over their careers.  

Community-facing Education Workshops:

In partnership with our Stanford Palliative Center of Excellence team, our fellows have opportunities to co-facilitate sessions on advance care planning and introducing palliative care to community members and patients. These free virtual sessions happen quarterly. For more information, see https://med.stanford.edu/palliative-care/events/workshops.html

Interprofessional Palliative Care Journal Club:

Each month, fellows gather with teams across our core sites to review and discuss recent articles and topics relevant to Palliative care. Recent topics have included stigmatizing language in medical records, disparities in palliative care and hospice access and advance care planning completion rates, time limited trials, methadone, triggers for palliative care consults, cultural preferences in end of life care, prognostication in neurologic disease, medical aid in dying over the years, and many more.

Palliative Care Grand Rounds: 

Once a month speaker series for fellows and teams across all sites to explore topics and issues relevant to Palliative Care. Recent topics included: engaging stakeholders to improve advance care planning and dementia care, bridging gaps and disparities with neurosurgeons and palliative care physicians as partners, lessons learned about teaching palliative care virtually, the significance of belief in miracles for patients with serious illness, caring for aging parents, the need for improved palliative care awareness and knowledge in patients and caregivers, communication on health outcomes in older LGBTQ adults, Islamic perspectives in end of life care, loneliness and social isolation among older adults, palliative care as the accidental activist: approaches to substance use in people with serious illness, goal concordance in surgical decision making, exploring grief through astrophysics storytelling, and many more. 

Shared Case Conference with Acute Pain and Addiction Teams

Quarterly conference with addiction, pain, and palliative teams to review shared cases and brainstorm learning for future similar scenarios. Fellows participate in presenting alongside faculty mentors.