The main goal of the ELPIS project is to enhance the quality of PC in the EU through a better and more uniform education at the undergraduate level. This goal is relevant also because of the increasing cross-border mobility of medical graduates across the Union. To achieve this goal, the ELPIS project had five intertwined objectives: 1. to promote the design of internally coherent and comparable online undergraduate medical education programs on PC, through the development of a theoretical educational framework 2. to promote effective implementation of online programs on PC, through the development of practice guidelines that are flexible enough to be - suitable for the local organizational context of higher education and PC - fit for the local cultural approach to palliative care and other end-of-life issues, including the students’ point of view 3. to broadcast sharable educational resources, in different European languages 4. to validate the theoretical framework and guidelines through testing and comparing the effectiveness of some local implementations of an online program on PC 5. to design and implement faculty development programs to sustain the design of curricula in PC and the use of the educational resources
Palliative care (PC) “is fundamental to human dignity and a component of the human right to health” (Resolution 2249 – 2018 of the European Parliamentary Assembly) and this is why education and training on PC are essential components of undergraduate medical education. Nevertheless, PC is not yet fully developed in the EU and the lack of services and teachers with a specific expertise in the PC domain also hamper the design and implementation of effective educational programs on PC for undergraduate students. Worldwide, many countries developed a core competencies catalogue for PC at the undergraduate level and, in Europe, the European Association for Palliative Care (EAPC) issued a White Paper listing and discussing the core competencies on PC education. The various forms of technology-enhanced learning and – more in particular – synchronous and asynchronous online learning are promising pedagogies to foster effective teaching of the PC core competencies, overcoming the constraints of resources, at least for most of the cognitive and technical-manual learning outcomes and for the basic relational skills. There is a need to explore and evaluate different pedagogies and technical solutions.