96727 Palliative Care
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particular session, location and mode of offering is the authoritative source
of all information about the subject for that offering. Required texts, recommended texts and references in particular are likely to change. Students will be provided with a subject outline once they enrol in the subject.
Subject handbook information prior to 2025 is available in the Archives.
Credit points: 6 cp
Subject level:
Postgraduate
Result type: Grade and marksThere are course requisites for this subject. See access conditions.
Description
This subject supports students in consolidating and synthesising knowledge in relation to palliative care provided across varied health care contexts and globally. Teaching and learning strategies focus on developing skills in the following core areas: effective communication at the end of life, symptom assessment (physical and psychosocial) and management for people with advanced progressive life-limiting illness, optimising care across interdisciplinary healthcare teams and across differing health settings, decision making grounded in best evidence, cultural and spiritual care, and grief and loss. In the online teaching modules students are supported to challenge and extend their knowledge of symptom management and end of life care to enable them to better describe the provision of optimal care for patients with palliative care needs, and their families/carers. Finally, strategies to enable resilience, emotional health and wellbeing, foster knowledge and skills for a supportive working culture.
Subject learning objectives (SLOs)
| A. | Distinguish key practices and principles of a palliative approach to care, delivered within a range of contexts for different patient populations |
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| B. | Examine and apply effective communication knowledge and skills in the context of working with people who have palliative and end-of-life care needs, and their families/carers |
| C. | Develop and apply capabilities in the assessment and evidence based management of common symptoms in palliative care |
| D. | Critically reflect upon and articulate ‘compassion values’ and ethical care, and how this knowledge and learning can uphold the care of vulnerable groups and support self-care. |
| E. | Critically appraise and apply the theory, research and evidence based palliative care literature to their own clinical practice and clinical decision making. |
| F. | Critically assess and evaluate perspectives and knowledge of palliative care and make links to acquisition of new learning. |
Contribution to the development of graduate attributes
The aim of this subject is for students to identify learning needs in the domain of palliative care and develop knowledge, skills, critical thinking and reflective capabilities for care and service provision to individuals with life limiting illnesses, their families/carers, and communities. This subject will broaden the students' orientation to understanding the needs and capabilities of individuals, communities, and health, social and government services, in managing the care of people in the palliative phase.
Teaching and learning strategies
In this subject, you will participate in a range of teaching and learning strategies that are designed to encourage you to develop your knowledge of evidence-based practice, within the healthcare context.
Orientation activities
Preparation for the Session - students are expected to undertake activities prior to the first week. These activities include online readings, videos, interaction with peers, and are important in helping students prepare for the subject's Assessment Tasks. This also provides students with an opportunity to meet and interact with peers. Students will learn through independent learning activities, group work, peer review, and participation in the Zoom meetings.
Independent learning activities
Relevant readings, videos and activities will be made available online relevant to the topic of the week. Students are expected to come to Zoom meetings prepared. This will enhance the students’ ability to progress successfully throughout the subject and complete assessment items effectively. The online material aims to enhance students’ understanding of the topic or delve deeper into a more specific area, compare experiences and ideas with others, and gain feedback. Information and links to all these learning activities can be accessed via Canvas as well as the subject outline.
Zoom meetings/workshops
Zoom meetings will provide opportunities for group activities and discussion, self-assessment, peer review and formative feedback from the subject coordinator. Zoom meetings will be conducted at a time that enables the majority of students to contribute. Students are strongly encouraged to attend Zoom meetings as these prepare students for the subject’s Assessment Tasks.
Feedback
Feedback will be frequent and takes several forms including self-assessment, peer review, automatic feedback from interactive activities e.g. quizzes, and from the subject coordinator. Formative feedback throughout the subject aims to increase student performance at summative assessments.
Live sessions
This subject will run 1 x 2 hour live session in the semester. This session is delivered by an industry expert so attedance is expected.
Content (topics)
- Overview of the history, practice and philosophy of palliative care
- Communication at the end of life
- Symptom (physical and psychosocial) assessment and management for people with advanced life-limiting illness
- Palliative care in specific populations-paediatric, aged care and intensive care patients
- Prognostication
- Underserved populations in palliative care
- Optimising care across healthcare teams and across differing health settings
- Cultural and spiritual care for people with advanced life limiting illness
- Legal and ethical aspects related to the care for people with advanced life limiting illness
- Dignity frameworks
- Trauma informed palliative care
- Supporting people in the context of grief and loss
- Self-care and resilience for staff and services involved in the provision of palliative care
Assessment
Assessment task 1: Critical incident reflection
| Intent: | Reflection is an important component of experiential learning. Critical incident reflection focuses on a particualr incident (not a dramatic incident), that had an impact on personal and professsional learning. It brings together components of the experience for making considered changes and improvements to practice, knowledge and meaning. This activity aims to facilitate an examination of learning needs in a particular area of palliative care. |
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| Objective(s): | This assessment task addresses subject learning objective(s): A and F This assessment task contributes to the development of graduate attribute(s): .0, .1 and .1 |
| Type: | Reflection |
| Groupwork: | Individual |
| Weight: | 15% |
| Length: | 1000 words. +/-10% (exclusing references or appendix) |
Assessment task 2: Development of Infographic
| Intent: | Infographics are data and/or information rich visualisations, used to educate and inform in a digital platform for social media. Students will research and collate content in a way that is captivating and accessible to a range of consumers.
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|---|---|
| Objective(s): | This assessment task addresses subject learning objective(s): A, B, C and E This assessment task contributes to the development of graduate attribute(s): .0, .1 and .1 |
| Type: | Design/drawing/plan/sketch |
| Groupwork: | Individual |
| Weight: | 30% |
Assessment task 3: Unfolding case scenario
| Intent: | This assessment contributes to student learning by developing clinical reasoning skills and well integrated contextualised knowledge through the creation of an unfolding case scenario. The activity facilitates understanding for complexity of situations in a palliative care context, aligned to identified learning needs |
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| Objective(s): | This assessment task addresses subject learning objective(s): A, C, E and F This assessment task contributes to the development of graduate attribute(s): .0, .0 and .1 |
| Type: | Case study |
| Groupwork: | Individual |
| Weight: | 40% |
| Length: | 2500 words +/-10% (exclusing references or appendix) |
Assessment task 4: Contribution to forums
| Intent: | This assessment facilitates student engagement outside of face to face teaching through reflective and collaborative communication in three moderated forums that consider the concept of suffering in palliative care. |
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| Objective(s): | This assessment task addresses subject learning objective(s): A, B, D, E and F |
| Type: | Reflection |
| Groupwork: | Group, individually assessed |
| Weight: | 15% |
| Length: | 3 x 200 word forum discussion posts and response post 100 words |
Required texts
There is no prescibed text for this elective subject. Linkage to resources material will be provided for the subject in Canvas.
References
Australian Institute of Health and Welfare 2014, Palliative care services in Australia 2014, Cat. no. HWI 128, AIHW, Canberra.
Australian Institute of Health and Welfare 2011, Trends in palliative care in Australian hospitals, Cat. no. HWI 112, AIHW, Canberra.
Australian Institute of Health and Welfare 2011, Identifying palliative care separations in admitted patient data: technical paper, Cat. no. HWI 113, AIHW, Canberra.
Gonçalves, M. B., Ciochetti, A. B., Rocha, J. A., Silva, J. J., & de Carvalho, R. T. (2019). Moral Dilemmas in Medical Decisions in Palliative Care. Revista Iberoamericana de Bioética 11:1-19
Hui, D., De La Cruz, M., Mori, M., Parsons, H. A., Kwon, J. H., Torres-Vigil, I., Kim, S. H., Dev, R., Hutchins, R., Liem, C., Kang, D. H., & Bruera, E. (2013). Concepts and definitions for "supportive care," "best supportive care," "palliative care," and "hospice care" in the published literature, dictionaries, and textbooks. Supportive care in cancer : official journal of the Multinational Association of Supportive Care in Cancer, 21(3), 659–685. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00520-012-1564
Gerber K, Hayes B, Bryant C. 'It all depends!': A qualitative study of preferences for place of care and place of death in terminally ill patients and their family caregivers. Palliative Medicine 2019;33(7):802?811
Gardner, C., (2015), The art of medicine. Medicine's uncanny valley: the problem of standardising empathy. The Lancet, Vol 386, pp. 1032 - 1033.
Clayton, J. M., Hancock, K. M., Butow, P. N., Tattersall, M. H., & Currow, D. C. (2007). Clinical practice guidelines for communicating prognosis and end-of-life issues with adults in the advanced stages of a life-limiting illness, and their caregivers. The Medical Journal of Australia, 186(12), S77.
Morgan, D. D., Tieman, J. J., Allingham, S. F., Ekström, M. P., Connolly, A., & Currow, D. C. (2019). The trajectory of functional decline over the last 4 months of life in a palliative care population: A prospective, consecutive cohort study. Palliative medicine, 33(6), 693-703.
Willmott, Lindy, White, Ben, Piper, Donella, Yates, Patsy, Mitchell, Geoffrey, & Currow, David (2018) Providing palliative care at the end of life: Should health professionals fear regulation? Journal of law and medicine, 26(1), pp. 214-245.
Sisk, B. A., Friedrich, A. B., DuBois, J., & Mack, J. W. (2019). Emotional Communication in Advanced Pediatric Cancer Conversations. Journal of pain and symptom management, 59(4) pp 808-817.
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