Attitudes

• To show students that the therapeutic process involves more than diagnosing and attempting to revert an altered pathophysiologic process and that illness is a complex state with physical, emotional, psychosocial and spiritual elements.
• To demonstrate the interdisciplinary approach of Palliative Care.
• To demonstrate preventive steps to avoid physical, psychosocial, and emotional problems.
• To emphasize that all interventions should be centered on the patient’s needs, desires and beliefs, thus ensuring patient control, whenever possible, of decisions which affect them.
• To have students identify their own attitudes toward death, and to identify and respect family attitudes towards death.
• To enable students to understand the unit of care, the family, through consideration of the family background and the impact of illness on the family group.
• To demonstrate how the impact and interpretation of illness depends on personal attitudes by providing examples of harmonizing the Canadian medical model of care with the cultural and spiritual backgrounds of patients and families.
• To involve students in discussions on ethical aspects of caregiving including euthanasia, resuscitation, truth telling, paternalism, aggressive versus palliative interventional therapy, incompetent patients, fairness in the health care system and strategies for resolving ethical issues.

Skill

• To enable students to integrate knowledge from across disciplines and to critically appraise clinical data, diagnostic tests and the literature in order to assist with decisions to initiate or stop various investigations and therapy.
• To demonstrate various techniques for communication with patients and families as well as how and why these techniques should be modified based on the personal, educational and cultural background of the patient and family.

Knowledge

• To describe the pathophysiology of common distressing symptoms in patients with advanced chronic disease and to suggest appropriate pharmacologic and non-pharmacologic techniques to combat these symptoms.
• To have students identify various organizational arrangements for delivery of Palliative Care and the relationship of these organizational structures to the existing health care system including the community resources available to patients with advanced disease and their families.
• To describe the elements of grief reactions and some techniques to prevent the development of pathologic reactions through caring for the patient and bereaved family.