PLATO: a global project to share teaching and learning in palliative care.
Contact address:
Academic Study Centre
Sir Michael Sobell House
Churchill Hospital
Headington
Oxford OX3 7LJ
Tel: 01865 225886
Fax 01865 225599
ssc@orh.nhs.uk
Project Aim:
To increase the effectiveness and accessibility of palliative care education in the three partner countries
The OBJECTIVES are:
- to improve the quality of training of educators in palliative care through greater focus on developing skills in reflection and experiential learning
- to strengthen interprofessional working practices
- to strengthen the processes of curriculum development through structured longitudinal evaluation
- to increase the relevance of palliative care curricula to local contexts
- to develop robust systems of support for less formally trained personnel (e.g. domiciliary care-givers and voluntary bereavement workers)
- to strengthen the role of rehabilitation in the curricula of palliative care
The APPROACH is:
to engage the expertise across the three partner institutions in a process of dialogue and debate, supporting each other and developing flexible models which can be adapted to a range of countries in palliative care.
PLATO is based on two principles:
- that increasing the effectiveness of palliative care education will lead to enhanced patient care.
Examples include: improved teamwork through interprofessional working practices, reflection used to analyse and enhance practice, experiential learning used to promote attitudinal changes towards greater patient involvement in decision-making.
- that structured, collaborative learning involving palliative care practitioners and academics from the three countries will result in more relevant change, more rapidly, than transmission of good practice from one country to another or developments by individual countries in isolation
Examples will include: the development of models of supervision of home-based care workers applicable to the local context, greater ownership of strategies.
Project lead - Katy Newell Jones.
