The Department of Family, Community & Preventive Medicine at Drexel University College of Medicine recently received accreditation from the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) for a new fellowship program in hospice and palliative medicine. This type of fellowship is only the second of its kind in Philadelphia.

The Hospice and Palliative Medicine Fellowship program's goal is to train dedicated physicians from any qualifying specialty to become leaders in the field of hospice and palliative medicine. The fellowship will focus on the clinical and educational disciplines within palliative care.

"Graduating fellows will be prepared for real world practice of hospice and palliative medicine after receiving expert training in symptom management, communication, prognostication, emotional and spiritual issues, and advance care planning," said B. Brent Simmons, MD, assistant professor and program director of the Hospice and Palliative Medicine Fellowship. "In addition, fellows will be trained in administration, research, and will be prepared to help train the next generation of hospice and palliative medicine physicians."

This is a twelve-month fellowship per ACGME guidelines and focuses on the clinical aspects of the discipline. It features a balanced approach to the practice of inpatient and outpatient hospice, and inpatient and outpatient palliative care. The balanced curriculum will give equal weight and exposure to the full spectrum of hospice and palliative medicine to prepare the fellow for any role he or she may want to engage in after they graduate. There will be three main elements to the proposed curriculum: hospice, palliative care inpatient consultation service, and an outpatient palliative medicine clinic.

Fellows will also do rotations in relevant disciplines including pain medicine, oncology, and congestive heart failure. In addition to the clinical framework, there is a mandatory research project, which can take the form of grant proposals, manuscripts for publication, continuous quality improvement, or clinical research projects. All projects will be supervised by a mentor among the clinical faculty. Finally, there is an integrated and longitudinal experience where the fellow will learn to teach residents and students about hospice and palliative medicine. During their rotations, they will often have a resident or student learning from them in the clinical setting.