Hospice & Palliative Medicine Fellowship Program

Teaching Program

We believe in a holistic approach to training with the goal to develop fellows into well-rounded leaders and educators, who are proficient in practicing across diverse clinical settings along the continuum of serious illness. In addition to an integrated Palliative and Geriatric Medicine weekly didactic curriculum, our fellows engage in focused discussion rounds centered around personal wellness, leadership development, professionalism, and scholarship. To further enrich the fellowship experience, we created a novel wellness curriculum to equip our fellows with skills to optimize resiliency, introspection, self-care and empathy, as well as workshops to explore and deepen their understanding of existential and spiritual distress. Fellows participate in simulations to develop their procedural skills in palliative extubations, joint injections, thoracenteses, and paracenteses.

Our program provides a strong focus on scholarly inquiry through dedicated scholar mentorship rounds, quality improvement workshops, and collaboration with faculty on department studies. Fellows complete a scholarly activity and quality improvement project for the year. In the past, fellows have written review articles and case-studies and implemented quality improvement processes within the department and even the medical center at large. There are also ample teaching opportunities through fellow-led lectures to medical students, residents and other fellow colleagues. Learning is further supplemented by the program’s support of fellows attending regional and national conferences.

Because the Kaiser Permanente Los Angeles Medical Center is home to numerous residency and fellowship programs, it has a long history of academic excellence. We leverage our robust didactics and research foundation to enhance our patient-centered care with cutting-edge evidences. Fellows will also learn to care for patients from different socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds within various healthcare systems through core rotations at the Kaiser Permanente West Los Angeles (WLA) campus, City of Hope National Medical Center, and Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles.

Our fellowship program boasts a high faculty-to-fellow ratio. With more than 20 board-certified faculty across both the LAMC and WLA campuses, we offer a deep well of diverse strengths from which fellows can draw. Our faculty is devoted to the successful maturation of our fellows into well-rounded and skillful palliativists. Technology is an integral part of our learning. The majority of our curriculum is available remotely so that access to lectures, videos, and current journal articles is only a few clicks away from your desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones. Lastly, we embed teaching into Health Connect, Kaiser Permanente LAMC’s EPIC-based electronic medical system.

Rotation Schedule and Call

Our palliative medicine fellowship program spans both the Kaiser Permanente Los Angeles and West Los Angeles medical centers, City of Hope Medical Center and Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles, engaging our fellows with a diverse patient population from a wide range of socioeconomic, ethnic, cultural and faith backgrounds. Our innovative and integrated clinical schedule alternates inpatient and outpatient weeks, allowing for learning through both continuity of care as well as transitions of care across settings. This is an integral component of our training as many of our patients cycle through the hospital, long-term care facilities and home as part of their dynamic journey through the continuum of serious illness. There is one call weekend per month (Friday 5-11pm, Saturday-Sunday 8am-11pm). Call is taken from home.