End-of-life care: a retreat format for residents.

Background: The challenge of teaching end-of-life care involves finding ways to incorporate both the science and the art of medicine. Objectives: To develop a curriculum so that internal medicine residents could more effectively (1) elicit patient's values, goals, and preferences for health care at the end of life, (2) communicate "bad news," (3) discuss patient preferences for nutrition and hydration, ventilator withdrawal, and cardiopulmonary resuscitation, (4) prescribe opioids using different routes of administration and, (5) Recommend appropriate treatment of symptoms common at the end of life Design: The daylong retreat utilized case presentations and problems for presenting scientific content and the film Wit to convey information related to communication, whole-patient assessment, and the palliative care approach. Materials from the Education for Physicians on End-of-Life Care (EPEC) project and the film Wit provided the main educational resources. Setting: All second-year internal medicine, and f...