Overview: Complex Care Conversations is an interactive, small-group curriculum for clinicians who treat patients dealing with serious, progressive illnesses such as heart failure, cancer and dementia.

This program offers guidance on approaching goals-of-care conversations more easily and effectively. These important discussions are frequently sensitive and should not be delayed or postponed. The sessions offer a framework for navigating conversations to elicit patients’ values and preferences in a way that is mutually transformative for clinicians and patients.

Learn about the course’s credit designation.

Program audience: Practice teams including physicians, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, nurses, nurse care managers, medical assistants, social workers and other team members as well as public health professionals.

Objective: Give clinicians key tools for effective communication and learn skills of balancing patients’ values with the medical reality when recommendations are given to patients and families. 

Providers will learn how to properly bill and code for these reimbursable activities. In addition, participants will receive education on bedside ethics when faced with surrogate decision makers, as well as prognostication that will enable them to guide patients and families in effective ways as patients approach the end of their life. Lastly, participants will learn techniques to reduce burnout and compassion fatigue in caring for very complex and fragile patients, creating a climate of healing for all involved.

This program is supported by funding from the Rhode Island State Innovation Model Test Grant, the Rhode Island Department of Health, University of Rhode Island’s Geriatric Education Center and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Rhode Island.