Interprofessional Palliative Care Fellowship Program

The Division of Palliative Medicine at MedStar Washington Hospital Center is a leader in palliative care education, research, and interprofessional care. Our physicians, nurse practitioners, social workers, pharmacists, and chaplains provide for the physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual needs of our seriously ill patients. Additionally, our Georgetown University School of Medicine faculty teach about serious illness, clinical ethics, and palliative care locally and at national conferences. Our one-year ACGME-accredited physician fellowship program is nested in a larger interprofessional palliative care training program that prepares clinicians from different disciplines to be experts and leaders in palliative care. We are proud of our program and we are excited to share more about who we are and the work that we do!

Interprofessional faculty and education

Our Georgetown University School of Medicine faculty includes Physicians, Nurse Practitioners, Chaplains, Social Workers, and Pharmacists. We are national leaders in palliative care research and education. Your teachers will come from this wide range of clinical disciplines. We are passionate about service to our patients and educating the next generation of clinicians.

You will receive an interprofessional education by training alongside social work and nurse practitioner fellows in our unique interprofessional palliative care training program. This is the ideal way to learn new, important skills in order to be a well-rounded palliative care clinician.

Breadth of training

Our physician fellowship program prepares fellows to deliver high quality palliative care across the spectrum of illness and care settings. This means we assist our patients early at the diagnosis of a serious illness all the way through to providing bereavement care. We serve across a variety of settings, from our supportive oncology clinics to the face-paced, high-tech surgical intensive care unit.

Your primary site of training will be MedStar Washington Hospital Center, a busy tertiary care, trauma, and burn center, which includes the Washington Cancer Institute and the MedStar Heart and Vascular Institute. You will provide palliative care services for patients suffering with devastating neurosurgical illnesses, with gynecological and surgical oncological diseases, and those with end stage heart failure being maintained on ECMO with the hope of receiving an LVAD or heart transplant.

Educational and research opportunities

Washington Hospital Center is the largest hospital in the MedStar Health system that includes Georgetown University Hospital and the MedStar Health Research Institute. These relationships put a health system’s worth of expertise and resources at your fingertips.

You will immediately become a leader and educator to the many learners that rotate on our service. We host third and fourth year Georgetown University School of Medicine students on their clinical clerkships in palliative medicine. A palliative care elective is required for critical care, oncology, surgical, and PM&R cancer rehab fellows. We are also a training site for pain and palliative medicine pharmacy residents.

Nationally recognized partnerships

We partner with Capital Caring Health to provide our fellows with a robust hospice experience. Capital Caring is one of the nation’s first and largest hospice providers, caring for more than 1,200 patients.

Children’s National Medical Center is our pediatric partner; fellows spend at least one month providing palliative care to seriously ill children at one of the top 10 pediatric hospitals in the country.

Didactics

Electives

To meet individual learning needs, each fellow may select elective rotations from within or outside of the MedStar Health-Georgetown system.

MedStar Health-Georgetown electives include clinical ethics, consult liaison psychiatry, interventional pain service, cancer rehabilitation, total elder care/geriatrics house calls, MedStar Georgetown University Hospital palliative care, MedStar Union Memorial Hospital palliative care (Baltimore, MD), and research.

Scholarship

Throughout the year fellows will participate in a variety of scholarly projects including quality improvement and present a year end capstone lecture.