Palliative Care: It's Not Just Hospice Anymore Specialization

In this course, you will be able to develop a systems view for assessing and managing pain in the palliative care setting. By the end of the course, you will be able to: 1) Describe the pain problem in the palliative care setting; 2) Assess a person’s pain, 3) Explain the benefits of integrative therapies and pharmacologic strategies to manage pain.

Palliative care provides important support for people living with serious or life-limiting illnesses and their family caregivers. In this course, you will learn to use symptom assessment tools to better understand which symptoms are present and which are most distressing. In subsequent weeks you will learn about some of the most common and distressing symptoms such as anorexia (loss of appetite), dyspnea (shortness of breath), fatigue (weakness), delirium(confusion) and constipation and nausea/vomiting. For each of these symptoms, you will learn about the underlying cause and potential ways to support people and their families to manage the symptoms with simple practical and non-medical approaches as well as a review of medications as appropriate. In addition, you will learn to help people with their emotional response to symptoms and loss of function.

You will be able to immediately use these insights, skills, and tools in your work with people living with serious illness. In other courses, you will learn communication skills, whole person assessment, how to ease physical pain and explore ways to ease psycho-social-spiritual distress.

In this course, you’ll learn how serious and life-threatening illnesses often affect emotional and spiritual well-being. Illnesses can increase stress as patients and families learn to live with a “new normal” that may often focus on illness. You’ll learn how to tell when normal sadness (or grief) becomes something more serious and needs to be addressed. People with serious illnesses also have social concerns as their family, friends and community support system becomes stretched, and sometimes fails. We’ll talk about resources and skills you can use to help support patients and families. You’ll learn about advance care planning, that includes shared decision-making, setting goals of care, and writing down plans for care.

In the Capstone Course you have the opportunity to put what you have been learning about in the Palliative Care Specialization into practice. Our team has created five activities that directly relate to what you have been learning in the course. You will need to talk with someone you know, perhaps a friend or family member, about their experiences living with serious and life limiting illness. You may want to engage several people as you go through the 5 assignments as they each will have unique experiences.

The Five Assignments: 1) Use the Nature of Suffering Evaluation Form to guide your conversation with someone living with serious illness and report and reflect on how this illness is impacting different aspects of their lives. 2) Using SNAP/Self-Awareness skills explore the values of someone close to you and your own values as relate to health, illness and dying. 3) Using the WILDA tool complete a pain assessment with someone living with serious illness. 4) Using the ESAS tool complete a physical symptom assessment with someone living with serious illness. 5) Have a conversation with someone you know about Advance Care Planning. In the assignment you will focus on who would be the person that they would want to speak for them if they could not speak for themselves, often known as the MDPOA. When you successfully complete all 5 of these assignments and the other course work you will earn the Coursera Specialization Certificate in Palliative Care. More importantly you will be prepared to help others live well with serious and life-limiting disease.