Physicians/PAs/NPs   

Effective communication is a cornerstone of quality palliative care. Communicating effectively with children, teens, and young adults with serious illness, and their families, requires a skilled approach that is attuned to the patient’s developmental age and stage. This course explores topics central to communicating with young patients and their families, including clarifying goals and values to facilitate decision making, responding to families that wish to limit information to young patients, and managing conflict.

The progressive illness or impending death of an infant, child, teen, or young adult can cause profound grief in the patient as well as the family. This course focuses on some of the most difficult emotional and spiritual aspects of caring for young patients at the end of life, including transference and countertransference, trauma-informed care, types of grief, caring for diverse families, and empowering patients and families in end-of-life decision making.

This course explores the key clinical features of rare complex conditions seen in pediatric hospice and palliative care. Learn how you can help parents advocate for their child while recognizing the limits of medical interventions, and identifying medical and psychosocial resources for families of children with rare/complicated diagnoses.

Transform your career. Learn evidence-based approaches in pain and symptom management to help support resilience and ease patients’ suffering. Help patients and families identify care goals of care. Build interdisciplinary teams.Students enrolling in this course should be certified Nurse Practitioners (NP, APRN) in any specialty area. Nurses with an MSN or DNP may also be qualified if they have significant clinical experience with patients with serious illness.

• May Course Start: Dahlin, C., Coyne, P.J., & Ferrell, B.R. (Eds). (2022). Advanced practice palliative nursing. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
• McPherson, M. L. (2018). Demystifying opioid conversion calculations: A guide to effective dosing. 2nd Edition. (Links to an external site.) Bethesda, MD: American Society of Health-System Pharmacists.

Cancellations may be made in writing up to the day before the first day of the course; a refund will be issued minus an administrative fee of $35. No refunds are possible for withdrawals once the course starts.  

Hospice and palliative care professionals work with many types of families in crisis and grief. Yet, even experienced clinicians may feel anxious when delivering care to infants, children, teens, or young adults. This course describes the challenges and joys of communicating with pediatric patients and their families, demonstrates how evidence-based communication tools can be applied in those populations, and reinforces how genuine communication is key in adult and pediatric hospice and palliative care.

The progressive illness and/or impending death of an infant, child, teen, or young adult can cause profound grief in the patient as well as the family. This course focuses on supporting those who are grieving and explores the importance of creating legacy so children and adolescents living with life-threatening illnesses know they will be remembered.

Many children, teens, and young adults with serious or life-limiting illness have been using medical devices since birth. Some pediatric patients may outgrow the need for such devices, while others will remain dependent on them throughout their lives. This course examines the use of medical technology such as feeding tubes, central lines, and respiratory devices in young patients with serious illness. It covers how to maintain these devices, and how to support patients and families in device management.

Assessing and managing pain is a fundamental part of high-quality palliative care and it requires a specialized approach when caring for infants, children, teens, or young adults. This course comprises four modules that highlight important considerations and effective clinical strategies in assessing and managing pain in infants, children, teens, and young adults.

Caring for patients nearing end of life requires an increased level of knowledge and skills. This course delivers evidence-based tools and resources in prognostication, communication, and symptom management, helping you better identify and support these patients and their families. You’ll also learn about regulatory and ethical issues, as well as hospice eligibility, coverage, and admission.

Helping patients with serious illnesses understand where they are in the disease process, what treatment options are available, the benefits of palliative care, and how to make informed choices are some of the most challenging aspects of patient-centered communication. This course delivers an overview of communication strategies for engaging patients throughout the decision-making process, including identifying goals of care, activating shared decision making, and overcoming barriers of communication. This is a CME course 

Developed for nursing professionals, this self-paced course delivers an in-depth overview of palliative care nursing, and provides practical tools and strategies to enhance your practice and effectiveness in caring for seriously-ill patients and families in any care setting.

The progressive illness or impending death of an infant, child, teen, or young adult can cause profound grief in the patient as well as the family. This self-paced online course prepares hospice and palliative care professionals to recognize and address the emotional, psychosocial, and spiritual suffering of children, teens, and young adults nearing the end of life and their families.

This self-paced course takes a deep dive into the differences between palliative care and hospice, and how they differ for adults and children. It reviews concurrent care for children, including how to identify patients who are eligible, exploring a wide range of pediatric diagnoses, common medical devices used in children with serious illness, and important elements of care coordination.

Assessing and managing pain in seriously ill infants, children, teens, or young adults is integral to high quality pediatric palliative care. This 7-hour course highlights key considerations and effective clinical strategies needed to address the physical symptoms of advanced illness in young patients, including patients with medically complex conditions.

Pediatric palliative care differs from palliative care for adults, especially as the end of life approaches. These differences affect not only patients and families, but the hospice and palliative care professionals delivering care. This course introduces you to the challenges, benefits, and value of pediatric palliative care and offers a starting point for building skills to effectively support infants, children, teens, or young adults with serious illness, and their families

Learn evidence-based approaches essential to caring for patients with serious illness, including communication, advance care planning, prognostication, assessment and treatment of common physical and psycho-social-spiritual symptoms of serious illnesses, care at the end of life, and more.

Students enrolling in this course should be PA's in any specialty or practice area. Students must attend at least 9 of 12 live Grand Rounds Sessions, Wednesdays, 12:00PM to 1:30PM Pacific time. 

Ethics play an important role in all areas of healthcare and can present unique challenges in pediatric palliative care where healthcare decision-making and family dynamics may be more complex. These factors, and the emotional toll of caring for a child experiencing life-limiting illness, can lead to ethical dilemmas and cause moral distress. This course examines the complex ethical concerns that hospice and palliative care professionals may encounter and delivers important strategies to build

This course equips providers in primary care, oncology, hematology, or other practice settings with the latest clinical strategies to effectively assess and manage pain and other distressing symptoms in patients with serious illnesses. It includes in-depth content and guidelines on the use of opioids, as well as integrative and complementary therapies that can ease symptom burden along the disease trajectory.

This series of interactive online courses gives clinicians in any practice setting new skills and resources that can improve the quality of care delivered to patients with serious illnesses. You’ll learn new clinical approaches in pain and symptom management, as well strategies for improving communication, empowering patients in healthcare decision making, integrating key palliative care services into your practice, and billing for palliative care.

Self-care and building resilience are essential for clinicians working with seriously ill patients—it guards against burnout, moral distress, and team dysfunction. This course provides practical tools and resources to help healthcare professionals recognize the warning signs of moral distress, identify their own beliefs and habits that may lead to burn-out or compassion fatigue, and utilize practical strategies for self-care and resilience-building.

Delivering bad news to a patient and/or family is one of the hardest things you do as a clinician working in palliative care. This course will equip you for those hard conversations with clear and effective strategies that improve communication, encourage empathy, and reduce stress for patients, families, and the palliative care team.

Delivering bad news to a patient and/or family is one of the hardest things you do as a clinician working in palliative care. This course will equip you for those hard conversations with clear and effective strategies that improve communication, encourage empathy, and reduce stress for patients, families, and the palliative care team.

Living with serious illness can be stressful for patients and families. Addressing psychosocial distress is critical to supporting patients and families through the journey of serious illness, and delivering quality whole-person care. Explore strategies and skills to assess how patients are coping with disease management and prognosis, and processing the prospect of dying.

Living with a serious illness often changes the way individuals experience their world. Faith and spirituality can emerge as important elements of a person’s care plan. This course helps you develop an approach to identify, evaluate, and address spiritual, religious, and existential concerns, and presents assessment tools and strategies for coping, and referral guidelines to intertwine quality healthcare with spiritual care.

Physician assistants are valued frontline providers who patients trust with their healthcare needs in varied clinical settings, including primary care practices, hospitals, and subspecialty medical clinics. This course offers PAs an introduction to palliative care and how it supports patients with serious illnesses. You’ll learn to conduct an advance care planning discussion and identify when patients could benefit from specialty palliative care

Physician assistants are valued frontline providers who patients trust with their healthcare needs in varied clinical settings, including primary care practices, hospitals, and subspecialty medical clinics. This course offers PAs an introduction to palliative care and how it supports patients with serious illnesses. You’ll learn to conduct an advance care planning discussion and identify when patients could benefit from specialty palliative care

Assessing and managing pain is a fundamental part of high quality palliative care. There are important differences to consider when caring for infants, children, teens, or young adults. This self-paced course delivers robust clinical skills aimed at effectively assessing and managing physical pain and understanding psychosocial factors that can impact physical suffering in seriously ill or terminally ill infants, children, teens, and young adults

This online course explores strategies to encourage patient participation in advance care planning conversations. Case studies illustrate how Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes are used in various scenarios, followed by an interactive exercise to help students apply the knowledge learned in the course.

Interdisciplinary teams are the cornerstone of palliative care, but can be vulnerable to challenges that arise when patients experience intense suffering caused by serious or life-limiting illness. Those issues can be heightened when the patient is a child, creating fear of conflict and team dysfunction. This course delivers the knowledge, tools, and resources to empower hospice and palliative care teams to create a culture of collaboration and support in which all members can thrive in their work.