Welcome to Promoting Effective Practice in Supportive and Palliative Care course unit on behalf of the CPD Programme Team. We hope that you will enjoy the varied learning experiences which this course has to offer over the next few months.
As Unit Lead I am delighted to extend a very warm welcome to the Promoting Effective Practice in Supportive and Palliative Care (PEPSPC) Unit at Level 7. The PEPSPC unit has been designed to provide practitioners with an enhanced understanding of the complex professional issues related to the care of adults living with progressive, life limiting illness; and, their families.
The unit focuses on the emergent nature of supportive and palliative care policy, the integration and application of knowledge drawn from supporting sciences, as well as specific knowledge drawn from practice based disciplines, in order to critically explore the concept and application of supportive and palliative care principles and interventions as extant within the evidence base.
The unit will enable you to explore a range of issues affecting the organization and delivery of effective supportive and palliative care in both institutional and community settings. The unit will also help you to enhance your knowledge and skills in relation to the facilitation of a shared care ethos, multidisciplinary team working, symptom management and effective communication with patients and families in receipt of a supportive and palliative care diagnosis.
The unit is informed by an enquiry based learning philosophy and utilises a combination of managed learning activities, facilitated seminar groups, as well as interactive lectures.
The unit is predicated on the premise that supportive and palliative care is an emerging speciality. Innovations and changes in practice occur with increasing regularity. The unit aims to help practitioners to adapt and develop the necessary knowledge, reflective skills and professional attributes to enable patients and their families to access services and participate in the therapeutic frame, whose goal is to maximize reciprocity, quality of life and well-being.
The unit will provide participants with experiences designed to enhance and challenge existing knowledge and skills, so as to better inform and facilitate professional, evidence based interventions on behalf of patients and family members and will:
- Help practitioners to adapt and develop the necessary knowledge, reflective skills and professional attributes to enable patients and their families to access services and participate in the therapeutic frame, whose goal is to maximize reciprocity, quality of life and well being.
- Provide participants with experiences designed to enhance and challenge existing knowledge and skills so as to better inform and facilitate professional, evidence based interventions on behalf of patients and family members.
- Enable participants to critically consider and evaluate the emergent nature of supportive and palliative care (SPC) to effectively engage and intervene with patients and families experiencing life-limiting illness.
- Assist practitioners to develop the necessary knowledge and skills required to challenge and innovate current practice within SPC and secure evidence-based interventions to enable patients and their families/carers to experience life-limiting illness with minimal distress.
Students will normally have the opportunity to receive feedback on formative work submitted prior to the summative assessment. Other feedback opportunities will also be available in class and online discussion boards. Online feedback is provided in Grademark. Provisional feedback based on internal marking will be made available prior to the Exam Board on the basis that these marks are yet to be ratified at the Exam Board and therefore may be subject to change. A standard feedback mechanism in Grademark is utilised across all postgraduate programmes within the School which provides detailed and constructive feedback on each component and aspect of assessment and identifies areas of strength and those aspects which could be enhanced.
Student feedback is obtained through open discussion forums on blackboard, in class discussions, via formal University unit evaluation forms and also qualitative, in house evaluations at the end of the unit.