Connect With Us
Connect With Us

Movement at our medical schools

Movement at our medical schools

Publication Date: January 28, 2021

Movement at our medical schools

 

The Coalition’s long-standing Massachusetts Medical Schools Collaborative has been hard at work. All four medical schools in Massachusetts are working together on several fronts around serious illness care. Led by Dr. Jennifer Reidy, Chief of Palliative Care at UMass Memorial Medical Center, the Collaborative recently launched focus groups with fourth year medical students.

“I think most medical students learn about serious illness care either in elective courses or ‘on the fly’ by observing other clinicians, so I’m interested to hear how they have or have not been taught these skills,” said Dr. Reidy. The focus groups are being facilitated by Dr. Roberta Goldman, a medical anthropologist from Brown University. “The students spoke very movingly about their training around serious illness care, positive and negative role modeling they have witnessed, and their experiences talking with patients and families about serious illness,” said Dr. Goldman.

Designed to give students the opportunity to share openly about the formal and informal serious illness care education they’ve received, the focus groups will provide rich context for the Collaborative’s work in curriculum and faculty development. The Collaborative is also working on manuscripts about our serious illness communication competencies and curriculum mapping, and will be presenting at the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine's Annual Assembly in February.

Join the Massachusetts Caregiver Coalition

Macc

We've joined the Massachusetts Caregiver Coalition! This innovative team is working to assess and address the needs of unpaid caregivers across the Commonwealth.

Executive Director Anna Gosline will be speaking at the inaugural 'Innovations in Caregiving' webinar on 2/11 at 1pm ET.

To learn more about joining the Massachusetts Caregiver Coalition, contact [email protected].

In case you missed it in our Twitter feed...

movement

When will people with disabilities -- who are two to three times more likely to die of COVID-19 -- get the vaccine? We're still waiting for an answer...

  • Check out this article by Jessica Contrera in The Washington Post.

 

Many children are experiencing death -- of a neighbor, a friend, or a family member -- for the first time because of COVID.

  • Kao Kalia Yang's A Map Into the World can help kids explore death even when they can't quite access what it means.

 

Losing her father made Dr. Christine Nevins-Herbert see her job differently at the HopeHealth Hulitar Hospice Center.

  • “Everybody’s experience is their own...but I get it on a different level now,” she reflected in this blog post.

 

Most Popular

Hospital staff revived a man's stopped heart - and he sued
Hospital staff revived a man's stopped heart - and he sued

January 13, 2021

The Coalition’s 2018 consumer research found that just 13% of Massachusetts adults report having a conversation with their doctor about the kind of end-of-life care they wanted. Part of the problem may be that the topic of death is just so hard to talk about, for both the patient and the doctor. “One of the things we hear really commonly is that people just don’t have a good understanding of what the road ahead looks like when they’re very sick,” said Anna Gosline, the Coalition’s director. “And so when you don’t have a really good understanding of what your prognosis is and what’s going to happen to you, it’s really difficult to know what to do or not do…”