UConn Health Hospice & Palliative Medicine Fellowship Program
The UConn Health Hospice and Palliative Medicine Fellowship is one of only a limited number of programs nationally that provides advanced specialty training for both physicians and nurse practitioners in palliative care. The fellowship serves as a critical pipeline for developing highly skilled clinicians equipped to meet the growing demand for serious illness care across inpatient, outpatient, long-term care, and home-based settings.
Mission
To train and develop palliative care specialists who deliver exceptional, evidence-based care to patients with serious illness while fostering professional growth, leadership development, innovation, personal resilience, and career sustainability through individualized mentorship and experiential learning.
Fellowship Aims
Graduates of the program are prepared to:
- Deliver comprehensive, patient- and family-centered palliative care across the continuum of care.
- Help patients with serious illness maintain meaning, purpose, quality of life, and goal-concordant care.
- Demonstrate advanced communication skills that support compassionate, culturally responsive, and individualized care.
- Effectively collaborate within interdisciplinary teams while recognizing and valuing the contributions of all care team members.
- Engage in lifelong learning, scholarly inquiry, quality improvement, and evidence-based practice.
- Serve as future leaders and innovators advancing the field of hospice and palliative medicine.
The UConn yearlong fellowship program offers exposure to various sites where palliative care is practiced, including the hospital, clinic, long-term care facilities, assisted living facilities, and the home.
The primary fellowship site is UConn Health, the state’s only public academic medical center, in Farmington CT, which is home John Dempsey Hospital, University of Connecticut School of Medicine and Dentistry, and a host of outpatient clinical practices. This environment gives fellows the opportunity to be both learners and teachers, which is key to developing skills in educating others in primary palliative care skills, collaborating effectively with various specialists, and coordinating care across the increasing complex health care system.
Highlights of the UConn palliative care fellowship include:
- inter-professional team and learner cohort
- communication skills workshops using the Vital Talk model,
- reflective practice that emphasizes the psychological elements of providing palliative care,
- enhanced focus on ambulatory curriculum and exposure.
Each fellow is mentored through a project of their choice over the course of the year. Options include abstracts submitted to the Annual Assembly of Hospice and Palliative Medicine, a quality improvement project, participation in research project with collaborators in the UConn Center on Aging, which is nationally recognized for translational research.
Palliative Care at UConn includes a mature team with three separate locations of clinical practice.
The Inpatient Palliative Care team is comprised of APRNs, physicians, a pharmacist, social worker and our chaplain, who round daily on hospitalized patients. This team receives referrals from the ICU and all the floors of the hospital. There is an especially close collaboration with hospital medicine. Internal medicine residents frequently rotate with this service.
The Supportive Care Program in the Neag Comprehensive Cancer Center provides comprehensive, interdisciplinary care designed to enhance quality of life for patients and families navigating cancer and other serious illnesses. Working in close partnership with oncology teams across the continuum of care, the team addresses complex symptom management, goals-of-care discussions, advance care planning, psychosocial support, and care coordination.
The Outpatient Palliative Medicine clinic is located in the Primary Care clinic. Physicians see patients with non-malignant serious illnesses, supported by a palliative care nurse and medical assistant. They work closely with social workers who can join for in-person visits and/or reach out to patients and families asynchronously. This team also has embedded palliative care clinics in neurology, seeing patients as part of a specialized inter-disciplinary team that focuses on Movement Disorders (e.g. Parkinson’s Disease) and Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).