Pediatric End-of-Life Care Skills Workshop: A Novel, Deliberate Practice Approach

INTRODUCTION: Pediatric end of life (EOL) care skills are a high acuity, low occurrence skill set required by pediatric clinicians. Gaps in education and competence for this special-ized care can lead to suboptimal patient care and clinician dis-tress when caring for dying patients and their families.METHODS: A half-day workshop using a deliberate practice approach was designed by an inter-professional workgroup including bereaved parent consultants. Pediatric fellows (neo-natal-perinatal medicine, critical care, hematology oncology, blood and marrow transplant) and advanced practice providers learned and practiced EOL skills in a safe simulation environ -ment with instruction from interprofessional facilitators and standardized patients. Participant perceived competence (self-efficacy) was measured before, immediately-post, and 3 months post workshop.RESULTS: There were 28 first-time (of 34 total) participants in 4 pilot workshops. Participants reported significantly increased self-efficacy post-workshop for 6 of 9 ratings, which was sus-tained 3 months afterwards. Most (92%, n = 22 of 24 respond-ents) reported incorporating the workshop training into clinical practice at 3-month follow-up.CONCLUSIONS: With early success of the pilot workshops, future iterative work includes expanding workshops to earlier, interprofessional learners and collecting validity evidence for a competency-based performance checklist tool. A project website (https://z.umn.edu/PECS) was developed for local and collaborative efforts.

Automated summary

This study designed a half-day workshop using deliberate practice approach for pediatric clinicians to learn and practice end of life care skills. The participants reported increased self-efficacy post-workshop and incorporated the training into their clinical practice.