‘Learning the Ropes’—Preparing Palliative Care Clinicians for Outpatient Practice (FR479)

Abstract

•Establish the elements of an educational needs assessment to guide training of outpatient PC clinicians.•Review a subset of HPM fellowship milestones and discuss their relationship to basic knowledge, skills, and attitudes essential for outpatient PC practice.•Identify educational methods to prepare PC clinicians for successful outpatient practice and integrate these educational methods into their local practices. Outpatient palliative care (PC) practices are increasingly prevalent as the recognized value of concurrent palliative- and disease-directed care grows in various disease types. PC providers who practice exclusively in a consultative inpatient model, as well as learners (such as Hospice and Palliative Medicine (HPM) fellows, Advanced Practice Provider (APP) students, and clinicians transitioning from other specialties) are often unprepared for the unique clinical challenges of outpatient PC practice. Needs vary significantly based on prior practice locations and clinician experience, since HPM fellows and APPs can come from a variety of specialties. Therefore, PC programs must be equipped to identify the unique educational needs of outpatient PC providers at their institution and apply established educational methods to meet these unique learning needs and promote productive outpatient clinical practice. This concurrent session will present the results of needs assessments of faculty, learners, and APPs at six institutions with established outpatient PC practices and will provide participants with tools to conduct their own assessments. A case-based approach will be used to identify the knowledge, skills, and attitudes required to overcome these challenges. Alignment of these educational domains to ACGME Milestones for HPM Fellowships will be highlighted to identify broadly-applicable categories of learning objectives for multidicipliary outpatient PC providers in varied practice settings. Finally, a sample of time-efficient, interactive, and clinically-focused educational modalities will be presented. Upon completion of this concurrent session, attendees will be equipped with a plan to conduct their own local needs assessment and implement simple educational strategies for the outpatient setting.