Article Text
Abstract
Introduction Including palliative care (PC) in overloaded medical curricula is a challenge, especially where there is a lack of PC specialists. We hypothesised that non-specialised rotations could provide meaningful PC learning when there are enough clinical experiences, with adequate feedback.
Objective Observe the effects of including PC topics in non-specialised placements for undergraduate medical students in two different medical schools.
Design Observational prospective study.
Setting Medical schools in Brazil.
Participants 134 sixth-year medical students of two medical schools.
Methods This was a longitudinal study that observed the development of Self-efficacy in Palliative Care (SEPC) and Thanatophobia (TS) in sixth-year medical students in different non-specialised clinical rotations in two Brazilian medical schools (MS1 and MS2). We enrolled 78 students in MS1 during the Emergency and Critical Care rotation and 56 students in MS2 during the rotation in Anaesthesiology. Both schools provide PC discussions with different learning environment and approaches.
Primary outcomes SEPC and TS Scales were used to assess students at the beginning and the end of the rotations.
Results In both schools’ students had an increase in SEPC and a decrease in TS scores.
Conclusion Non-specialised rotations that consider PC competencies as core aspects of being a doctor can be effective to develop SEPC and decrease TS levels.
- medical education & training
- palliative care
- adult palliative care
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Footnotes
Contributors GG, SM and MAdC-F conceived and designed the study. GG and GAMdB collected the data. GG, DC-F and MAdC-F analysed the data. GG and MAdC-F were the major contributors in manuscript writing. DC-F, GAMdB and SM provided meaningful inputs and critical review of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
Funding This work was supported by CAPES, grant number 88881.188776/2018-01 (PhD sandwich scholarship—Edictal 47/2017) to the first author for analysis and manuscript writing.
Competing interests GAMdB is a supervisor in MS2 and participates in collecting data.
Patient consent for publication Not required.
Ethics approval This research was conducted following the Declaration of Helsinki. We assured any student who was uncomfortable with the research enquiring would not feel obliged to participate. Themes related to death could be emotive and/or sensitive; thus, students could contact the researchers to receive support or referral if/as required. The Research Ethics Committee of both medical schools approved the study (58198016.4.0000.5404/2016; 58198016.4.3001.5411/2016).
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
Data availability statement Data are available upon reasonable request. The data from scales and questionnaires are available under request to Guilherme Gryschek (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-6371) for reasonable research use.
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