While medical school students expect to learn the procedural and technical aspects of medicine during their time in school, there's one aspect of the profession instructors tend to shy away from teaching students: death.
In an op-ed for STAT, Junaid Nabi, MD, discussed the importance of learning how to talk to patients about death and dying, an aspect of the field medical school professors, in his opinion, do not focus on.
To learn how to broach the subject, Dr. Nabi enrolled in a communication strategies during end-of-life care course at Boston-based Harvard Medical School. He said he was surprised to learn he wasn't the only student who felt ill-equipped to discuss death with patients.
According to Dr. Nabi, physicians' limited ability to discuss issues such as how long patients will survive, what dying is like or whether spirituality plays a role in a patients' last moments is a result of the system they work and reside in: Physicians are taught to delay death for as long as possible, so when death or dying is the most likely outcome, physicians are ill-equipped to discuss ways in which to ease suffering and make a patient's pain more bearable.
To address the issue, Dr. Nabi suggested medical schools incorporate required courses into their curriculum that provide students the time and space to reflect on how to care for patients with terminal diseases. He also suggested older physicians engage with their younger counterparts to teach them how to approach such situations.
"Physicians have a responsibility to initiate and maintain an open channel of communication with each patient, understand and address the values that he or she holds dear and … talk frankly about the prognosis of his or her disease. If they lack the skills to talk openly about dying and death … they do their patients a disservice and possibly prevent them from receiving the best possible end-of-life care," he said.
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