Faculty Profile: Leslie Blackhall

Leslie Blackhall, MD

Dr. Blackhall, who heads GMGPC’s Palliative Care section and won a Department of Medicine “Outstanding Educator” award in 2013, shares her thoughts about teaching end-of-life care.

“I have been interested in medical education for most of my career—mainly because I have a passion for caring for patients with life-limiting and terminal illnesses, and felt that I myself had received very little education on this topic. It is a big omission, since all of us will eventually die, and most people over the age of 40 will die of chronic, progressive, incurable illnesses like metastatic cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and dementia. When I was appointed the end-of-life thread leader for the new medical school curriculum, I was asked to review the content in this area. There was none.

“This struck me like a thunderbolt—that there was no curricular content concerning the clinical changes in people with common incurable diseases, as they approach the end of life. No wonder we find it hard to care for terminally ill patients—we don’t teach physicians how to do it. They need to learn about the natural history of life-limiting illnesses, and the changes in functioning and symptoms which occur over time. Without such knowledge, how can young physicians develop a thoughtful approach to effective and appropriate medical care for these patients?

“With this insight in mind, I developed a curriculum that focuses on end-of-life as part of the continuum of care for all patients, with associated and predictable disease-specific clinical challenges. With help from expert medical educators like Gene Corbett and colleagues at the nursing and medical school, we are implementing this new approach to medical and nursing education in end-of-life care by including lectures, simulations, and case-based learning. It has been an enormously satisfying, challenging and exciting experience.