Discoveries
Med school deans support more training in end-of-life care
In a survey conducted a few years ago, Dana-Farber researchers found that many medical students believe they don't receive adequate training to care for terminally ill patients. Now, a new study by the investigators suggests that medical school curriculum leaders nationwide feel the same way.
Amy Sullivan, EdD, Matthew Lakoma, and others studied options for training future doctors to care for gravely ill patients.
Eighty-four percent of the associate deans for medical education or curricular affairs taking part in the project agreed that end-of-life-care education is"very important," but 67 percent said their curricula don't allocate enough time to it. Published this summer in the journal Academic Medicine, the study found that most of the deans favored integrating such instruction into existing courses or clerkships, rather than creating new courses specifically on end-of-life care.
The research was carried out by polling curricular leaders at 62 accredited medical schools in the United States. Associate deans for medical education or curricular affairs were surveyed because they're apt to have the best handle on the academic offerings and climate within their institutions. As the study's lead author, Amy Sullivan, EdD, of Dana-Farber, remarks ,"Our hope was to gauge institutional and faculty attitudes about end-of-life care education and understand the obstacles to change in order to increase learning opportunities for students."
Co-authors were DFCI's Matthew Lakoma and senior author Susan Block, MD; Harvard Medical School students Anne Warren and David Hwang; and Massachusetts General Hospital psychiatry resident Karen Liaw, MD.
"A successful program requires that faculty from a variety of courses be prepared to teach end-of-life care within their disciplines," Sullivan says. "Our findings highlight the need to develop and support faculty leaders with a particular interest and expertise in this area to drive ongoing efforts for change."
