The Evolution and Dissemination of the Education in Palliative and End-of-Life Care Program

Even with growing numbers of fellowship-trained palliative care providers, primary palliative care knowledge and skills are needed to meet the national demands for palliative care. The Education in Palliative and End-of-Life Care (EPEC) Program has been one model of training clinicians in primary palliative care skills. In our second 5 years of development and dissemination, we have focused on adapting EPEC to different specialties.

Our aim was to describe the development of EPEC adaptations and document the dissemination of our curriculum.

The study design was a survey of EPEC trainers and documentation of other dissemination efforts via literature and Internet searches. Our subjects were all EPEC trainers and end-learners of our curriculum. We measured dissemination and teaching efforts by our trainers and evidence of EPEC use via literature and EPEC's searches.

In Internet second 5 years of active development, teaching, and dissemination, we have created five major adaptations (EPEC-Oncology, EPEC-Oncology-Canada, EPEC-Emergency Medicine, EPEC-India, and EPEC for Veterans) and trained more than 1000 trainers. Through the efforts of these Trainers and our online dissemination, more than 74,000 reported end-learners have been taught parts of the EPEC curriculum. In addition, we discovered multiple medical school courses, continuing medical education (CME), courses and specialty guidelines that have incorporated material from EPEC.

In its second 5 years, EPEC remains a robust platform for adaptation to new specialties and for dissemination of primary palliative care knowledge.