A high-impact approach to death and dying training

We spend hundreds of hours teaching our students how to approach the sick and/or injured patient. But what about the relative left behind when someone passes away? What do we teach them about the management of breaking bad news? To expand further on that, how many of our paramedic students have ever seen or been around a deceased person—outside of a funeral—and just how many witnessed a deceased patient during clinical placement either post-resuscitative efforts or during a welfare check?

Multiple paramedic programmes provide communication courses within their programme structure, with Griffith University offering a course called Human Skills in Medicine, which is a core foundational year education course across all Griffith Health Medical and Paramedic programmes. However, like most other communication courses, it is not specific to paramedicine, but aimed more broadly across key medical courses. It does however provide valuable learning within the area of breaking bad news, which has been leveraged into contextualised scenarios, tailored to enhance student learning experiences within our paramedicine programme.