Dying Well-Informed: The Need for Better Clinical Education Surrounding Facilitating End-of-Life Conversations

The need for improved clinical education surrounding the way difficult news is delivered and how to initiate end-of-life (EOL) discussions with seriously ill patients and their families is essential. Physicians and medical students often report feeling unprepared or uncomfortable with broaching the topic of death with their patients and families [1]. Early and honest conversations with patients concerning diagnoses and advance directives help patients and their families make well-informed decisions regarding future medical care, minimize pain and fears, and allow patients to experience a “peaceful death [1].” Moreover, end-of-life conversations frequently focus on resuscitation plans (advance directives), but should be broadened to include patients’ psychosocial, physical, and economic concerns. Transparent, realistic, and sensitive end-of-life conversations can help patients maintain autonomy and dignity in the dying process and increase their quality of life as they near death. Additionally, initiating these conversations can alleviate emotional stress and physical symptoms, prevent invasive, costly, unnecessary, and unwanted care, aid grieving families through the bereavement process, and increase patients’ satisfaction with end-of-life care provisions [2]. Overall, more attention and training must be delivered to physicians so that they are better prepared to initiate end-of-life discussions in a patient-centered way, focusing on patients’ values and priorities. Requiring a more in depth, developmentally appropriate, and standardized training in EOL and palliative care for physicians-in-training in all disciplines in medical education is necessary. Redesigning medical school EOL curriculum will ensure physicians are better prepared to discuss death and dying and to ensure that seriously ill patients are dying well-informed.