Lessons from palliative care to support care team wellbeing

Palliative care does more than assemble an interdisciplinary team of experts for patients and families facing complexities of serious illness. This medical speciality questions a core premise of healthcare that death is a failure. In doing so, palliative care helps upend some harmful mechanisms when trauma happens to care team members and creates compassionate opportunities for meaningful connection.

Additionally, palliative care’s trajectory from its early emergence to its embrace by mainstream medicine provides a guide for leaders working to advance care team safety and wellbeing to support a thriving healthcare workforce.

This Insights Huddle focuses on ideas of team-based care and compassion, placing an emphasis on interdisciplinary processes that allow connection across the full spectrum of human experience. The discussion also explored ways to talk more candidly about death and break patterns of fear and blame that create unnecessary suffering for healthcare professionals.

A recording of this Insights Huddle is available here.

Click here to read the discussion recap.

Jennifer K. Clark, MD
Palliative care physician and consultant
Author of the book Suffer