Palliative and end-of-life care in the masters of social work curriculum

Abstract

Curricula are needed for preparing MSW graduates for specialty hospice and palliative care practice and non-specialty practice. While there are practice competencies for specialty practitioners, consensus on a core curriculum for all MSW students would be beneficial. Consensus on basic palliative care knowledge and skills for non-specialty social workers in health care and other settings and subsequent curriculum development are also needed. Innovative ways in which to introduce basic and more specialized content on palliative care into the already-crowded MSW curricula will be needed.

Defining Core Competencies for Generalist-Level Palliative Social Work

“…Improved training may also help address a serious workforce shortage by enhancing the quality of generalist-level care and encouraging larger numbers of social workers to seek specialistlevel training and qualifications. 28e33 At present, very few Master's level social work schools in the U.S. or Canada have dedicated palliative care courses 34 and postgraduate training opportunities are limited.…”

What are social work students being taught about palliative care?

“…Introducing palliative care content into existing required and elective courses with other important content and skills is difficult. Smaller social work programs may be challenged to develop a dedicated course on palliative care; however, the low number of dedicated palliative care courses (Berkman & Stein, 2018) suggest opportunities across MSW programs. Most regions around the United States have hospice and/or hospital- or community-based palliative care programs that may be tapped for expert adjunct faculty and for fieldwork.…”

“…The purpose of this study was to determine the type and extent of content areas included in MSW courses dedicated to palliative care and in courses with palliative care content. This report presents a content analysis of the 106 courses with some palliative care content from 63 MSW programs in the United States and Canada, as previously reported by Berkman and Stein (2018).…”

“…Only 105, or 37.5%, of all MSW in the United States and Canada participated, and of those, only 42 programs submitted syllabi. Based on our examination of program websites, however, it appears that there were only a few programs with a palliative care elective that did not participate in the study (Berkman & Stein, 2018).…”

“…Of 105 participating social work programs, only 10 had courses dedicated to palliative care and only a few had plans to develop a dedicated course. More favorably, there were 106 courses in 63 MSW programs with some palliative care content, although the majority had <25% of course content, and few had at least 50% of course content related to palliative care (Berkman & Stein, 2018).…”