Hospice & Palliative Medicine Fontana Medical Center

The Kaiser Permanente Fontana Hospice and Palliative Medicine Fellowship program is a one-year clinical program aimed at training in the care of seriously ill patients and their families.

Our program aims to:

1. Develop physicians who are competent in providing evidence-based and patient-centered care across palliative medicine settings, including inpatient consults, outpatient clinic, nursing homes, home palliative and hospice settings.
2. Develop leaders who are effective in leading and working with an interdisciplinary team, including nurses, social workers and chaplains, to provide patient-centered care.
3. Develop physicians who utilize evidence-based palliative medicine in all healthcare disciplines.
4. Develop resilient, empathetic, and compassionate physicians who can handle difficult cases while still providing a high level of clinical care for patients with advanced illness.
5. Develop physicians who can advocate for their patients and families to optimize patient-centered care along the disease continuum across all clinical settings.

Fellows will rotate at the Kaiser Permanente Fontana and Ontario Medical Centers. These centers serve the majority of San Bernardino County, a section of eastern Los Angeles County, and the northwest portion of Riverside County. As of 2017, about 10,000 of San Bernardino County’s 2 million residents could benefit from palliative care services and yet there is only capacity in outpatient and inpatient based palliative care programs to support about 1/3 of the established need. Our goal is to help grow Palliative Medicine in the area and beyond by training the next generation of HPM leaders.

The Kaiser Permanente Fontana and Ontario Medical Centers are teaching sites for family medicine residents, internal medicine residents, psychiatry residents, and medical students from the Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine. Fellows have ample opportunities to learn how to teach these students and residents during their palliative medicine rotations and shared didactics.