Social Work Student Views on Palliative Care Learning Resources

Abstract

Many social workers are expected to work with individuals and families who are dealing with life-limiting illnesses, yet during their university education they may not have been exposed to materials that address issues related to death and dying. The Social Work Department of University of New England in Armidale, Australia designed and delivered a palliative care teaching and learning session using publicly funded online materials. Themes emerging from questionnaire and focus group data analysis included appreciation for the importance and emotional demands of the materials, sensitivity and flexibility among educators who ideally have work experience in the field, expanding presence of social work philosophy in curriculum materials and exploring spirituality, and examining culture-informed practice in greater depth. Among the implications is the need for concerted efforts to teach about death and dying using high quality accessible materials, while ensuring social work values and approaches are reflected in the content.

Palliative care education and its effectiveness: a systematic review

“…Several PCE programs utilised eLearning resources [36,46,55,63]. This mirrors the findings The main limitation of the current study is that a meta-analysis was not conducted to evaluate the PCE programs' effectiveness under review.…”

“…A total of 26 studies utilised palliative care materials to develop a PCE program for healthcare professionals, 22 of which used self-developed palliative care materials [28,31,32,33,34,36,37,39,40,42,43,44,46,47,48,49,51,53,56,57,58,59] and four of which employed existing online resources [36,46,55,63]. There were three studies that utilised the self-developed palliative care materials to develop PCE programs for family caregivers.…”

“…There were seven studies that employed qualitative methods to evaluate the effectiveness of the PCE programs [27,36,48,51,53,55,63]. The evaluated areas included: the content of the program and curriculum design [27,36,48,53,63], benefits of the simulation learning [55], and satisfaction of the learning experience [48]. The evaluations indicated the PCE programs helped participants to cope with death and dying and end-of-life care in a more positive way [36,53,63].…”

“…The evaluated areas included: the content of the program and curriculum design [27,36,48,53,63], benefits of the simulation learning [55], and satisfaction of the learning experience [48]. The evaluations indicated the PCE programs helped participants to cope with death and dying and end-of-life care in a more positive way [36,53,63]. The satisfactory rates of the learning experience ranged from 88% [55] to 100% [48,51].…”

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

“…Different models of delivering specialty palliative care education to MSW students may increase the opportunities for reaching more students. Descriptions of different models exist, including some that report outcome data (Agnew & Duffy, 2010; Supiano & Berry, 2013; Turner et al, 2015). Competing electives among course offerings and finding faculty qualified to teach a specialty palliative care course may be challenging.…”