Undergraduate

Undergraduate Palliative Care Education

The UBC Medical Curriculum incorporates Palliative Care education throughout all four years, following a “spiral” approach. This means students are repeatedly exposed to core themes, with each exposure deepening in complexity as their general medical knowledge and understanding of context grow.

Students are required to complete core components of Palliative Care education, with the option to explore additional elective components for those wishing to gain further expertise in this field. The Division also offers a flexible learning opportunity known as the Legacy Project, where students work with patients to help them create a meaningful legacy item for their loved ones.

Clinical electives in Palliative Care are limited due to training capacity. Interested students should apply early and be prepared to travel, as this increases their chances of securing a spot in an elective.

Teaching Objectives

Attitudes

  • Help students understand that therapeutic care involves more than diagnosing and treating pathophysiological processes. Illness is a multifaceted experience, including physical, emotional, psychosocial, and spiritual elements.

  • Highlight the importance of the interdisciplinary approach in Palliative Care.

  • Teach students to anticipate and prevent physical, psychosocial, and emotional issues that can arise in palliative care.

  • Emphasize that all interventions should be centered on the patient’s needs, desires, and beliefs, ensuring they retain control over decisions that affect them.

  • Encourage students to examine their own attitudes toward death, while recognizing and respecting the attitudes of patients and their families.

  • Teach students to understand the “unit of care” as the family, considering family background and the impact of illness on the family group.

  • Demonstrate how personal attitudes influence the interpretation of illness and the importance of harmonizing the Canadian medical model with the cultural and spiritual backgrounds of patients and families.

  • Engage students in discussions on ethical issues in caregiving, such as euthanasia, resuscitation, truth-telling, paternalism, and the fairness of the healthcare system.

Skills

  • Enable students to integrate knowledge from multiple disciplines, critically appraising clinical data, diagnostic tests, and literature to make informed decisions about initiating or stopping investigations and therapies.

  • Demonstrate communication techniques for engaging with patients and families, while highlighting how these techniques should be tailored based on individual, educational, and cultural backgrounds.

Knowledge

  • Educate students about the pathophysiology of common distressing symptoms in patients with advanced chronic diseases, along with appropriate pharmacologic and non-pharmacologic management strategies.

  • Help students understand the various organizational structures for delivering Palliative Care, and how these structures relate to the broader healthcare system, including community resources available to patients and families.

  • Teach the elements of grief and provide strategies for preventing pathological grief reactions through supportive care for both patients and bereaved families.

Legacy Project

Since 2016, UBC has offered The Legacy Project, which allows medical students to work with patients who wish to leave behind a tangible legacy item for their loved ones. Over forty students have participated in the project, most through the undergraduate FLEX course, while others have volunteered.

Here’s a recent update from one of the students who participated in the project:

“I completed the legacy project with Mr. J this week. It was a wonderful experience for both of us. Over the past month, I visited his home twice. Together, we created a legacy document, which included his answers to interview questions we designed. The document ended with a poem he wrote. Mr. J gave me a list of people he wants me to email the legacy document to, including his family and healthcare providers. He was very pleased with the process and the final product, and he encouraged me to share his experience to normalize discussions about illness, life, and death.”

You can read Mr. J’s legacy document here: Mr. Jiwa’s Legacy Project

To learn more about the Legacy Project, visit the Legacy Project Information page.

Students or residents interested in working on a legacy project are encouraged to contact Dr. Pippa Hawley at phawley@bcccancer.bc.ca.