Supporting Families and Caregivers

Welcome to Supporting Families and Caregiver, the fourth course in the Palliative Care Always specialization. This course takes a deep dive into the challenges families and friends of a patient with serious illness face and how you can care for and support them as a provider, social worker or family friend. Supporting Families and Caregivers focuses especially on the children of a patient with serious illness and their caregiver, and teaches you the best way to empower them to get the support they need. By the end of this course, you will be able to provide critical avenues of support for the people who are instrumental to your patients care, wellbeing and quality of life. This module will provide you with information on the course structure and first steps.

This module provides a review of the key concepts learned in the courses Essentials of Palliative Care, Symptom Management in Palliative Care and Transitions in Care from Survivorship to Hospice. Check your knowledge with the ungraded quiz in the next section and review the summary videos, if necessary. Also contained in this module are the Sarah case study videos from Essentials of Palliative Care and Symptom Management for those who want review her story.

Clinicians can support families experiencing cancer by regularly assessing both the child’s adjustment and the parents’ ability and confidence in helping their children cope. Child and family guidance professionals can act as a resource. This module will review basic screening and assessment of child adjustment, and offer practical strategies to help families talk about difficult topics and maintain a sense of normalcy during serious illness.

In this module we discuss the caregiver experience in detail, learn how to screen for caregiver distress and provide advice to support caregivers.