Advanced Palliative Medicine Course

Lesson 1 • Illness Trajectories and Prognosis

Introduces common disease trajectories and prognostic frameworks. Builds foundational skills for timing palliative interventions appropriately.

Lesson 2 • Palliative Care Across Settings

Maps care delivery across hospitals, home, and community settings. Enables clinicians to adapt practice to diverse care environments.

Lesson 3 • Defining Palliative Care Today

Covers WHO definition, historical evolution, and misconceptions. Grounds all subsequent clinical work in a shared conceptual framework.

Lesson 4 • Interdisciplinary Team Structure

Identifies roles within palliative teams and collaboration models. Prepares clinicians to function effectively within team-based care environments.

Lesson 1 • Validated Assessment Instruments

Reviews widely used symptom scales and their clinical applications. Equips clinicians to select appropriate tools for specific patient contexts.

Lesson 2 • Pain Assessment in Depth

Covers pain history, characterisation, and mechanism identification. Provides the diagnostic precision needed to guide targeted pain management.

Lesson 3 • Psychological and Existential Screening

Introduces screening for depression, anxiety, and existential distress. Connects psychological assessment to integrated care planning.

Lesson 4 • Principles of Symptom Assessment

Establishes assessment philosophy and patient-reported outcome frameworks. Links accurate measurement to effective symptom management planning.

Lesson 1 • WHO Analgesic Ladder Application

Applies the three-step analgesic ladder to clinical scenarios. Guides stepwise escalation and appropriate opioid initiation decisions.

Lesson 2 • Interventional and Non-Pharmacological Pain

Introduces nerve blocks, neuraxial analgesia, and complementary approaches. Expands the pain management toolkit beyond oral and systemic medications.

Lesson 3 • Analgesic Pharmacology Essentials

Reviews opioid and non-opioid mechanisms, pharmacokinetics, and receptor pharmacology. Provides the scientific basis for rational analgesic prescribing.

Lesson 4 • Opioid Titration and Rotation

Covers dose calculation, titration protocols, and opioid rotation techniques. Enables safe and effective opioid management in complex patients.

Lesson 1 • Dyspnoea Assessment and Treatment

Covers mechanisms, measurement, and pharmacological relief of breathlessness. Addresses one of the most feared and prevalent symptoms in serious illness.

Lesson 2 • Nausea, Vomiting, and Bowel Symptoms

Identifies causes and applies targeted antiemetic and bowel management strategies. Reduces symptom burden from gastrointestinal complications common in advanced illness.

Lesson 3 • Neurological and Psychiatric Symptoms

Addresses delirium, anxiety, depression, and seizures in palliative populations. Equips clinicians to manage neuropsychiatric crises safely and compassionately.

Lesson 4 • Skin, Wound, and Oral Symptoms

Covers pressure injury prevention, wound odour, and oral mucositis management. Addresses comfort-focused care for symptoms often overlooked in advanced illness.

Lesson 1 • Communicating Prognosis and Uncertainty

Teaches honest, compassionate prognostic disclosure while acknowledging uncertainty. Enables patients to make informed decisions without removing hope.

Lesson 2 • Goals-of-Care Conversations

Structures conversations to elicit patient values, hopes, and care priorities. Aligns medical treatment plans with what matters most to patients and families.

Lesson 3 • Foundations of Serious Illness Communication

Introduces communication frameworks and the evidence base for skilled dialogue. Establishes why communication is a core clinical competency in palliative medicine.

Lesson 4 • Delivering Bad News Effectively

Applies the SPIKES protocol and related frameworks to breaking bad news. Reduces patient distress and builds therapeutic trust during critical conversations.

Lesson 1 • Core Ethical Principles Applied

Applies autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice to palliative scenarios. Builds a practical ethical reasoning framework for clinical dilemmas.

Lesson 2 • Advance Care Planning Fundamentals

Defines advance care planning as an ongoing process, not a single document. Prepares clinicians to initiate and facilitate planning conversations proactively.

Lesson 3 • Capacity Assessment in Practice

Teaches the four-component capacity assessment and documentation standards. Ensures clinicians can determine and document decision-making capacity accurately.

Lesson 4 • Ethics Consultation and Committees

Describes when and how to engage ethics consultation resources. Provides a structured approach to resolving intractable clinical ethical conflicts.

Lesson 1 • Recognising the Dying Process

Identifies clinical signs of imminent death and communicates them to families. Enables timely transition to comfort-focused care and family preparation.

Lesson 2 • Palliative Sedation Therapy

Defines indications, ethics, and protocols for proportionate palliative sedation. Distinguishes therapeutic sedation from euthanasia and guides informed consent.

Lesson 3 • Nutrition, Hydration, and Dying

Addresses medically assisted nutrition and hydration decisions at end of life. Guides evidence-based, values-aligned decisions about artificial hydration.

Lesson 4 • Comfort-Focused Medication Management

Covers anticipatory prescribing and subcutaneous medication protocols for dying patients. Ensures symptom control is maintained when oral routes are no longer feasible.

Lesson 1 • Non-Cancer Serious Illness

Applies palliative approaches to heart failure, COPD, renal failure, and liver disease. Addresses prognostic uncertainty and symptom burden in non-malignant conditions.

Lesson 2 • Palliative Care in the ICU

Integrates palliative principles into intensive care environments and withdrawal decisions. Bridges critical care and palliative medicine for patients with life-threatening illness.

Lesson 3 • Palliative Care in Dementia

Addresses symptom recognition, feeding decisions, and goals of care in dementia. Equips clinicians to provide comfort-focused care for cognitively impaired patients.

Lesson 4 • Underserved and Marginalised Populations

Identifies disparities in palliative care access and applies equity-focused strategies. Ensures clinicians can deliver culturally responsive care to vulnerable populations.