Hospice volunteers in the curriculum of medical psychology: effects of their visitation

Abstract

"Dying and death" is rather an infrequent topic in the course of medical psychology at the beginning of medical studies. Indeed the issue "interaction with terminally ill and deceasing patients" is for most students of particular importance. To accommodate with the students interest, we diversify the lessons related to practice. Therefore we invite hospice volunteers to participate our courses since the winterterm of 2000/01. They give account of their experience and report how to accompany terminally ill patients during their last days. We wanted to investigate the effect of the hospice volunteer presentation on the students attitude towards the hospice volunteer assignment. We designed a questionnaire based on expert rating and literature studies, to requested our students (N = 205; 57% female, 43% male) as well as the hospice volunteers (N = 9) to execute it in winterterm 2003/04. Based on the students dates we were able to develop four reliable scales due to a factor analysis (explained total variance = 55%): I. encouragement to vocational training; II. clarification of the need of expertice; III. sensitisation for the concerned persons experiences; IV. pointing the value of hospice work. The hospice volunteers evaluated the scales from their point of view. The most distinctive result was attained in scales I (M = 4,4) and II (M = 3,7). In fact regarding the teaching effects we received similar results for both groups. The hospice volunteers visitation obtained positive response.teaching evaluation, hospice volunteers, medical education, medical students, death and dying

Keywords

• teaching evaluation
• hospice volunteers
• medical education
• medical students
• death and dying