Curriculum Innovations: Implementing a Neuropalliative Care Curriculum for Neurology Residents
Citation Manager Formats
Make Comment
See Comments

Abstract
Background and Objectives Neuropalliative care is an emerging interprofessional field that aims to improve communication and quality of life for all people affected by serious neurologic disease. Teaching neuropalliative care skills is a key objective for neurology residencies, and the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education requires proficiency in palliative care. The objective of this study was to describe a novel longitudinal multimodal curriculum in neuropalliative care communication and evaluate its feasibility and outcomes.
Methods and Curriculum Description We designed a multimodal curriculum focused on neuropalliative care communication skills using as our theoretical foundation transformative learning theory. We implemented this program for neurology residents at a single academic institution over the course of their 3-year training. Residents underwent (1) 3 communication workshops using VitalTalk modules and simulated patient encounters, (2) 3 or more observed clinical encounters with structured faculty feedback, and (3) at least 3 annual neuropalliative care lectures. We evaluated the effect on learners' self-assessed confidence in neuropalliative care skills with preworkshop and postworkshop questionnaires.
Results and Assessment Data In 2021, 14 of 20 eligible residents attended our workshops and completed the preworkshop questionnaire, and 12 of those completed the postworkshop questionnaire. After the workshop, a larger proportion of residents (75%, 9/12) agreed or strongly agreed that they felt confident leading family meetings compared with before the workshop (57%, 8/14). While more than 90% of residents felt confident recognizing patient and family emotions both before and after the workshop, the workshop improved their confidence in responding to such emotions. Still, some residents neither agreed nor disagreed (42%, 5/12) about feeling confident in responding to emotions after the workshop, and many commented on wanting more training in this area.
Discussion and Lessons Learned The successful implementation and high attendance among eligible participants demonstrate the feasibility of our longitudinal multimodal neuropalliative care curriculum. The evaluation of intervention outcomes suggests that residents' confidence in neuropalliative communication skills improved. Our study shows that VitalTalk is a tool that can be adapted to teach neuropalliative communication skills for neurology residents, and this program can be easily adopted by other neurology training programs.
Glossary
- ACGME=
- Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education;
- COVID-19=
- coronavirus disease 2019;
- ICU=
- intensive care unit;
- MCNC=
- multimodal curriculum in neuropalliative care;
- PGY=
- postgraduation year;
- SP=
- simulated patient;
- UW=
- University of Washington
Footnotes
↵* These authors contributed equally to this work as co-senior authors.
Go to Neurology.org/NE for full disclosures. Funding information and disclosures deemed relevant by the authors, if any, are provided at the end of the article.
Submitted and externally peer reviewed. The handling editor was Roy Strowd III, MD, MEd, MS.
- Received April 26, 2022.
- Accepted in final form September 16, 2022.
- © 2022 American Academy of Neurology
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (CC BY), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Letters: Rapid online correspondence
REQUIREMENTS
You must ensure that your Disclosures have been updated within the previous six months. Please go to our Submission Site to add or update your Disclosure information.
Your co-authors must send a completed Publishing Agreement Form to Neurology Staff (not necessary for the lead/corresponding author as the form below will suffice) before you upload your comment.
If you are responding to a comment that was written about an article you originally authored:
You (and co-authors) do not need to fill out forms or check disclosures as author forms are still valid
and apply to letter.
Submission specifications:
- Submissions must be < 200 words with < 5 references. Reference 1 must be the article on which you are commenting.
- Submissions should not have more than 5 authors. (Exception: original author replies can include all original authors of the article)
- Submit only on articles published within 6 months of issue date.
- Do not be redundant. Read any comments already posted on the article prior to submission.
- Submitted comments are subject to editing and editor review prior to posting.
You May Also be Interested in
RELATED MULTIMEDIA
Dr. David E. Vaillancourt and Dr. Shannon Y. Chiu
► Watch
Related Articles
- No related articles found.