Spiralled Palliative Care Curriculum Aligned with International Guidelines Improves Self-Efficacy but Not Attitudes: Education Intervention Study

PURPOSE: Despite recommendations that palliative care education should be in all health professional programmes, such education is ad-hoc and variable. To reduce variability, the European Association of Palliative Care (EAPC) published a comprehensive guideline for curricula development. This study evaluates a new palliative and end-of-life care course for medical undergraduates aligned with the EAPC guidelines, focusing on knowledge, skills and attitudes. METHODS: Final-year medical students were surveyed using two validated questionnaires: Self Efficacy in Palliative Care (SEP-C) and Thanatophobia scale (TS). We compared the intervention group, that were exposed to an integrated palliative medicine course throughout the three clinical years, with a control group that were not exposed to the new educational intervention. RESULTS: For self-efficacy, the intervention group had statistically significantly higher scores than the control arm. The control group had high scores compared with international data. Positive attitudes to dying patients were low and did not differ between the two groups. CONCLUSION: A well-designed palliative and end-of-life curriculum that is aligned to EAPC guidelines increases the self-efficacy of medical students in managing palliative patients but has little effect on attitudes to dying people. This is likely to be influenced by other factors such as the need for experiential learning.