Hospice and Palliative Medicine Fellowship

Our program strives to foster clinical excellence, intellectual curiosity, cultural humility, critical reflection and compassion through clinical experience, evidence-based practice and mentorship, with a goal of developing palliative medicine physicians who have lifelong learning, teaching and self-care skills. 

 Curriculum 

• Adult inpatient service: 27 weeks 
• Hospice including inpatient, outpatient and pediatric: 10 weeks 
• Long term care/ inpatient hospice: 4 weeks 
• Electives: 4 weeks 
• Ethics: 2 weeks 
• Pain clinic: 2 weeks 
• QI project: 2 weeks 
• Radiation oncology: 1 week 
• Fellows also rotate through an outpatient continuity clinic for a half day each week 
• Some clinic sessions are home palliative visits 

Three weeks of vacation may be taken during any of the rotations; a maximum of two weeks can be taken at once. 

Train future teachers, innovators and leaders in palliative medicine by modeling use of evidence-based medicine and active learning and teaching in formal and informal settings.  Advocacy for patient-centered care is a tenet in our program, with a focus on cross-specialty collaboration and professionalism. 

The fellowship begins with a core educational “Boot Camp” series covers key topics in palliative medicine.  

• Formal weekly didactic sessions taught by faculty in palliative medicine and specialist faculty 
• Journal Club sessions held each month, with fellows presenting an overview of an article of their choice 
• A “Residents as Educators” (RAE) course taught by Department of Internal Medicine faculty culminates with the fellow teaching a didactic session while being observed by the RAE faculty 
• Guided mentoring of individual scholarly projects 
• Attend the AAHPM Annual Meeting. Reimbursement for costs is available.

The program trains physicians in interdisciplinary approaches to patient care through interdisciplinary team teaching and exposure to a variety of hospice and palliative medicine environments at the University of New Mexico, the New Mexico Veterans Administration Medical Center and in the New Mexico community. 

Fellows work with our board-certified palliative medicine physicians who have: 

• Primary boards in: 
• Internal medicine 
• Emergency medicine 
• Family medicine 
• Surgery 
• Secondary boards in: 
• Oncology 
• Surgical oncology 
• Geriatrics 

The team also includes palliative medicine trained advanced practice nurses, social workers, a chaplain, registered nurse, administrative support persons and the Director of UNM’s Art in Medicine program.