GERON 6564 - Interdisciplinary Approach to End-of-Life/Palliative Care

Health care providers, regardless of practice settings, will inevitably work with patients facing acute or long-term situations involving life-limiting illness, dying, death, grief, and bereavement. These patients and their families experience a variety of needs throughout their time of illness. These needs are addressed by the help of many professional disciplines specifically trained to diagnose and treat these needs. This course provides an interdisciplinary (e.g., medicine, nursing, social work, pharmacy, ethics) discourse on the provision of holistic (bio-psycho-socio-spiritual) care for patients and their families experiencing life-limiting disease. The course will introduce health professional students to the knowledge, skills and values within each discipline necessary to meet the needs of this population. Students will learn both unique, discipline-specific knowledge and skills in working with the dying as well as knowledge and skills necessary to work effectively as a collaborating member of the interdisciplinary health care team. The course provides students an opportunity to see through a variety of professional disciplines’ frameworks the needs of the dying patient and family, become familiar with the treatment approaches employed by these various professions in working with the dying and their families, develop an appreciation for the expertise and roles of these different disciplines in the complementary delivery of care to the dying and their families, and employ collaboration skills necessary for effective patient and family care.  The course will meet weekly for 2 hours per class session. Some sessions will be divided into two 60 minute sessions, and at times, an entire hour class period will focus on discipline specific content, as noted in the course schedule.