Formal Training in Palliative Care for the Trauma Surgeon: Hospice and Palliative Medicine Fellowship

We aim to review the impact of palliative care on patient outcomes, share an overview of the evolution of palliative care in trauma surgery, describe the different palliative care training opportunities for trauma surgeons, and highlight future directions for surgical palliative care.

The literature demonstrates the benefit of palliative care to healthcare-related quality outcomes and describes some of the barriers to implement it into the trauma surgery and critical care realms. It also highlights the need for palliative care teaching curriculums in surgical residency programs and reviews current strategies to implement this.

Palliative care aims to alleviate suffering across multiple domains and treat the patient and family as a unit to provide goal concordant care. Utilization of palliative care principles in trauma surgery has emerged as a crucial component of comprehensive patient care. We discuss formal hospice and palliative medicine training, the benefits of this fellowship, and how surgeons integrate this into their careers.