EOLPodcast

Ep. 511 Being with Dying: Teaching Death to Medical Students with Kevin Dieter MD

Learn about innovative educational programs for medical students and the impact they are having.

My special guest Dr. Kevin Dieter is a family medicine and hospice and palliative care physician who helped to develop the nationally recognized palliative care curriculum at Northeast Ohio Medical University. He created a virtual learning module called “Being with Dying” for medical and pharmacy students to teach them what they need to know to be at the bedside of a dying patient. He discusses the course he offers, including training healthcare providers. Learn more from his website:

walking-home.com

Listen here:

This episode includes:

  • How Kevin first learned about end-of-life care from his patient “Mary”
  • How Kevin went from being a family doctor to a hospice doctor
  • The value of exposing medical students to dying patients
  • 3 Pillars of wisdom:
    • dying are our teachers both directly and indirectly
    • we are the medicine for patients in our presence
    • dying is more than a medical event
  • How he helped initiate a learning experience called “The Hospice Patient as Teacher” for 3rd year medical students
  • How patients don’t want their physician to “run away” when they are dying
  • The power of home visits for patients
  • What “Being with Dying” consists of
  • Why this course can be replicated by other programs
  • Why he no longer talks about “good” or “bad” deaths
  • How Kevin became an Anam Cara

Links mentioned in this episode:

If you enjoy this content please share it with others and consider leaving a review on iTunes. Thanks again to all supporters on my page at Patreon.com/eolu, and to @yogat3ch for buying me a coffee and James Schultz who made a donation on Paypal! Your contributions make all the difference and ensure this podcast stays ad-free.

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