An Educational Initiative Describing Clinician Teachers' Experiences Following Serious Illness Communication Skills Faculty Development Training.

Abstract

Background: Serious illness communication skills (SICS) are essential competencies for clinicians to possess. Unfortunately, SICS teaching is not routinely taught and many clinician teachers (CTs) never received training on how to teach them. We funded two cohorts of CTs to learn an evidence-based approach to SICS teaching to scale a unified approach to such training.

Objective: The primary aim of this study was to explore CT experiences and attitudes toward SICS teaching following completion of VitalTalk Faculty Development training. Our secondary aim was to identify perceived barriers and enablers experienced by CTs in the translation of newly acquired skills into the workplace.

Design/measurements: Survey and semi-structured interviews administered post-training.

Setting: Large metropolitan academic hospital in Canada. Fifteen (83%) of CTs completed the survey and 6 (40%) were interviewed. Participants were 38 years old (avg), female (80%), physicians (87%), nurse practitioners (13%), and in practice 8 years (avg).

Results: One-hundred percent of participants would recommend the course to colleagues, believing it increased their SICS teaching quality and comfort to teach this topic in varied settings. Post-training, 90% of cohort 1 and 0% of cohort 2 taught SICS in workshops. Seventy percent of cohort 1 and 60% of cohort 2 taught SICS at the bedside across 10 specialties and interdisciplinary groups. Top cited teaching enablers were funding, protected time, and administrative support. All participants reported being likely to teach a workshop within the year. Eighty percent reported training increased their comfort to lead such conversations and 67% reported more frequently engaging in them. Qualitative analysis revealed that successful implementation requires SICS teaching to be valued at every level of the institution.

Conclusion: Investing in faculty development for a group of CTs led to increased confidence in teaching about and having serious illness conversations and informed needs for a local community-of-practice primed to rapidly scale SICS teaching.