Reconstructing Palliative Care Practice: A Beginning

NOTE: This course has a registration capacity of 50 participants

Completion of this class will result in the receipt of six and one-half (6.5) continuing education hours.

The mission and values of social workers practicing in healthcare and palliative care specifically can be overshadowed in hierarchical systems where we are a minority profession. The goal of this workshop is shared learning to begin to reconstruct palliative care practice, questioning some primary constructs that have infused healthcare practice and policy. By introducing experts beyond palliative care, we evolve a model that both integrates and interrogates the learnings and experiences of clinicians over the past half-century. Our intention is to highlight the unique “red thread” of skill, authenticity, and values that is at the core of social work practice and essential to the care of patients and families as we self-educate toward the goals of restoring trust, challenging biases, and mitigating inequities. As we follow this connecting thread through aspects of our work such as ethics, inequities, culture, and spirituality across settings and diagnoses, we maximize our abilities to identify and reconstruct opportunities for honoring divergent values, enriching the care of patients and families, enhancing meaning in the work and impacting legacy. The established curriculum, insights, and group discussion are the foundation for reinforcing our social justice mandate, identifying skills to challenge inequities and honor sources of meaning to both sustain and enrich the self, the work, and our profession. This shared time creates an opportunity for social workers to review their participation in promoting practices that may in fact perpetuate a white western model of responding to serious illness.