What are social work students being taught about palliative care?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: Palliative social workers have taken steps to increase the numbers of social workers trained and competent to deliver effective psychosocial palliative care. Despite these developments, masters of social work (MSW) programs have only begun to develop curricula preparing students for entry-level practice. This study sought to determine the type and extent of content areas included in MSW courses dedicated to palliative care or with content related to palliative care practice. METHOD: A cross-sectional study using an online questionnaire was conducted. All 248 accredited MSW programs in the United States and 32 programs in Canada were invited to participate. Participants were asked to name the courses in their MSW program that were dedicated to, or included content on, palliative care, and submit the syllabi for these courses. Data comprised course content for each class session and required readings. A grounded theory approach was used to identify the topics covered. RESULT: Of the 105 participating programs that responded to the survey, 42 submitted 70 syllabi for courses with at least some palliative care content. There were 29 topics identified. The most common topic was grief, loss, and bereavement, followed closely by behavioral and mental health issues, and supporting family and friends; cultural perspectives and advance care planning were also common topics. For the 10 syllabi from courses dedicated to palliative care, supporting family was the most common topical area, followed closely by interprofessional practice and advance care planning. SIGNIFICANCE OF RESULTS: Although there are many challenges to introducing palliative care content into MSW programs, including unqualified faculty and competing course material and electives of equally compelling content, there are model curricula for dedicated palliative care courses. With the large growth of palliative care programs, the time is ripe to add specialty palliative care courses and to add palliative care content into existing courses.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".