University of Arizona Launches End-of-Life Medical Training Program

The University of Arizona Health Sciences has launched an Interprofessional End-of-Life Care Training Program, designed to teach students to incorporate a multicultural and interdisciplinary perspective to end-of-life conversations with patients and their families. The curriculum highlights age, gender and cultural sensitivity training for doctors, nurses, pharmacists and other professional providers. The program's serious illness and end-of-life care curriculum toolkit offers cases that faculty can add to existing courses. "Uniformly, every Health Sciences student expressed the need and interest in getting this training," said UArizona Center on Aging co-director Mindy Fain, MD. "There's clearly a need for training our health professional students across the Health Sciences in serious illness and end-of-life care." The initiative also aims to close cultural and racial gaps in accessing and using hospice care. "Some of the information that we got back from faculty and other providers is they know the information is out there, but some of it is so general it's hard for them to incorporate in their care," said the Center on Aging's Lisa O'Neill. "We want to give students the skills to have those conversations with their specific patients."

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