The overall goal of our project, “Pediatric End of Life Care Skills (PECS): Building interprofessional competence and resilience,” is to improve end of life (EOL) care for patients and their families by equipping interprofessional trainees with the unique skills required to provide this care. EOL care is a high-acuity, low-occurrence skill set required by pediatric clinicians, who often report high distress caring for dying children.

Our team created a feasible and effective pediatric EOL workshop for subspecialty fellows, who participate in simulated family conferences with standardized patients and technical skills stations. Throughout development to delivery, the model has been uniquely informed by the expertise of interprofessional faculty (physicians, nurses, social workers, chaplains) and bereaved parents who have experienced the death of a child.

We now aim to expand our program to include additional medical trainees plus interprofessional trainees from the Schools of Nursing and Social Work; develop and validate interprofessional pediatric EOL care competency-based assessments; and formalize and expand our parent faculty program. Overall, we will disseminate a model of enhanced interprofessional education within competency-based framework and decrease emotional distress in providing difficult EOL care. We will meet multiple goals of the Academic Investment Education Program to: enhance teaching and assessment of learners to improve education; improve the learner experience; increase extramural grants focused on educational research; and, ultimately, improve the health system and clinical care.

The following are materials used to plan our half-day workshops from start to finish. Documents are not meant to be comprehensive of the whole process required; in particular, the planning and program evaluation will look different among institutions, learners targeted, etc.

Objectives for the overall workshop and each component are incorporated into the following materials.

Debriefing Structure Document (Given to facilitators only)
Preliminary Case Info (Given to facilitators only)
Resource folder
Workshop intro
Learner Case Documents

Michigan Cards