Learning and Teaching Palliative Care: Can We Do Better?

Abstract

Copyright: © 2013 MacLeod RD. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Palliative care and medicine are relative newcomers to the field of population health. With any new discipline comes an expectation that its practitioners are able to convey to those who don’t know, what it is that is special or different about that discipline. Can we be sure that we are giving enough attention to learning and teaching of palliative care and medicine? Twenty years ago, James and MacLeod identified a number of aspects of palliative care education that were problematic [1]. There are a number of those elements that remain potentially problematic today, particularly with regard to the way in which they are addressed in teaching. They include the lack of a long tradition and adequate conceptualisation of palliative care; the significance of psychological, emotional and spiritual aspects of care; the importance of, but at times, inadequate understanding of symptom management; the multiand inter-professional nature of palliative care; the range of different settings of palliative care and the fact that palliative caregivers work in situations where the emotional, psychological and spiritual demands on them may be immense. Over the last two decades there have been huge advances in all aspects of palliative care but there remain challenges for the way in which it is taught.