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Motivational interviewing is a collaborative counseling style designed to assess and strengthen a person’s motivation to take action. This powerful tool has been shown to improve patient engagement, promote goal setting and achievement, and lead to better patient outcomes. This course explores the foundations of motivational interviewing and teaches professionals in all disciplines how to integrate this technique into their work.

Are you a health professional or hospice volunteer who wants to learn complementary therapies to help support your patients? Aromatherapy, the use of essential oils to promote well-being, has a growing base of research and support in modern healthcare. This course will introduce you to this age-old practice and teach you its many applications to help ease the suffering of palliative care patients.

Learners enrolled in this course explore aspects of diversity, equity, and inclusion to develop self-awareness and build professional skills that promote a safe and welcoming workplace environment. The course provides an opportunity for learners to consider how self-reflection can lead to leadership behavior and management strategies that maximize organizational harmony and effectiveness.  

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.

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.

If you are a professional caring for people with serious illnesses, this course offers you and your team the tools and skills you need to work cohesively to provide the best whole-person care to patients and families. This course is designed for professionals from all disciplines in all care settings. (See related courses below for Core Concepts for Nurses, Core Concepts for Chaplains, Core Concepts for Social Workers; team training also available.)

Spiritual and existential distress are common forms of suffering for patients and families impacted by chronic or serious illness. This course provides chaplains with a comprehensive understanding of palliative care best practices, and new skills and strategies to effectively support seriously ill patients.

This course builds on the holistic, patient-centered skills, and strengths of social workers and brings into focus the important role they play as part of transdisciplinary teams. The course explores how this foundation is used to address values, mindfulness, critical thinking, and relationships.

Widely ranging cultural backgrounds are present in most communities and frontline clinicians, including those in primary care and subspecialty practices, must be culturally aware on all levels. Serious illness presents even more complex challenges. This course explores the cultural sensitivity tools, suggestions, and approaches for patients and their loved ones during stressful illness.

 

Advance care planning empowers patients to identify what gives their life meaning and articulate the kind of healthcare treatments they would want, or not want, if a catastrophic event or illness leaves them unable to speak for themselves. This course provides a comprehensive overview of advance care planning that can be used to orient and train all staff regarding the importance of documenting care preferences.

Communication and documentation are critical for effective care management; however, meaning can sometimes be elusive, misunderstood or not interpreted clearly. Care managers will learn how to effectively understand and interpret communication in written, verbal, and non-verbal form. Additionally, care managers will learn skills for enhancing meaningful communication in all settings with clients and other professionals to improve every day interactions, creating healthy forums for problem solving, and engaging in robust collaboration.

This 1-hour course delivers strategies for conducting advance care planning discussions with patients and families by focusing on their goals and what matters most to them. Learn when and how to confidently begin advance care planning conversations, and apply concepts and skills through interactive activities.

For people with chronic or serious illness, good nutrition is an essential part of holistic palliative care. Developed by nutrition experts, with generous support from The Westreich Foundation, this two-course series explores the latest research and offers practical approaches for using nutrition to improve quality of life in any stage of illness. Purchase the full series or individual courses.

 

Creating art is a journey of personal expression and self-awareness that increases resilience and boosts well-being. It can be a powerful mechanism for anyone coping with grief, stress, or anxiety. This 6-week, instructor-led course will help you understand how art can facilitate healing. The course content includes tools, readings, and videos, with personal feedback from an expert instructor. No artistic experience required.

Students are required to complete all assignments weekly.

Advance care planning conversations help patients consider and document the treatment choices they would make if they could no longer speak for themselves. Such conversations are a routine part of healthcare, but guiding patients through them takes skill and a framework of support. This 2-hour course outlines how to integrate advance care planning into your daily work, using best practices to improve patient and practice outcomes.

Advance care planning conversations help patients consider and document the treatment choices they would make if they could no longer speak for themselves. Such conversations are a routine part of healthcare, but guiding patients through them takes skill and a framework of support. This 2-hour course outlines how to integrate advance care planning into your daily work, using best practices to improve patient and practice outcomes.

The Chaplaincy course builds on Transdisciplinary Essentials by first focusing on chaplaincy practices unique to palliative care, performing a spiritual assessment and developing a plan of care, and interventions useful in serious illness and their outcomes. The Chaplaincy Essentials concludes by exploring the role of palliative care chaplains as leaders and advocates.

The Social Work Essentials course builds on the natural skills and strengths of social workers, with their holistic and patient-centered practice and strong commitment to self-awareness, and focuses on the important role that social workers play on the palliative care team.  It expands on this foundation to address values, ethics, mindfulness, critical thinking and relationships.  It concludes with careful attention to working with change, loss and dying, and working with people in grief.

Care managers and care coordinators play an important role in ensuring that patients and/or health plan members get the right care. This course will help you develop a deeper understanding of palliative care and learn about evidence-based therapeutic approaches, determining who qualifies, and effectively communicating options with clients. Developed in conjunction with the Coalition for Compassionate Care of California, this course was created by certified palliative care case managers and tested by some of America’s leading health plans.

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.

Palliative care has been shown to improve clinical outcomes, reduce unnecessary readmissions, and lower costs for many hospitals and health systems. Clinical and administrative leaders need a framework for evaluating data that shows how palliative care services impact their organization. Developed by a nationally recognized team of clinicians and analysts, this course provides a roadmap for gathering the data needed to make the case for creating, sustaining, or expanding your palliative care services.

Food choices have a significant impact on health and wellbeing at every stage of life. Learn about nutritional therapies in palliative care, including supportive nutrition, nutrition screening vs. assessment, the underlying dynamics of food-drug interactions, and how nutrition affects common symptoms of serious illness.

Food choices have a significant impact on health and well being at every stage of life. For people with chronic or serious illness, good nutrition is an essential part of holistic palliative care. In this course, you’ll explore the role of nutrition in palliative care, the importance of food quality, how social determinants of health affect accessibility to healthy food options, and strategies for using healthy food choices to connect families to their culture and identity.

Self-paced courses can start at any time after registration and must be completed within 90 days.  There are no refunds for self-paced courses.

The What Every Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist Needs to Know About Palliative Care course provides LMFT workers with guidance, tools, and techniques on how to initiate a discussion about palliative care, initiate advance care planning discussions, identify patient goals, and facilitate difficult conversations with patients and family members.  It also provides information on ways to integrate palliative care elements into generalist LMFT practices.

What Every Patient Advocate Needs to Know About Palliative Care teaches patient advocates, working in every care setting, the benefits of palliative care. The course includes a wealth of resources that patient advocates can use to improve the care of patients they serve, including delivering bad news, goal setting, advance care planning and more. Patient advocates will learn when to refer a patient to palliative care and the benefits of providing palliative care in various care settings.

Palliative care is specialized care, an extra level of support for people with serious or chronic illnesses. According to the National Association of Social Workers, most social workers, regardless of practice setting, will at some point work with clients facing a life-limiting illness, death, grief, and bereavement. This self-paced course delivers an introduction to the principles of palliative care, with additional guidance and tools relevant to social workers working with seriously ill individuals.

POLST stands for Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment. It is a physician order that gives patients more control over their care by specifying the kinds of medical treatment they want to receive during advanced illness. Developed in partnership with the Coalition for Compassionate Care of California, this course helps health professionals understand the role and value of this document, and how to use it when documenting and honoring patient wishes.