All Professionals   

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.

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.

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.

 

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.

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.

 

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.

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.

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.