Our core curriculum follows the certification standards developed by the American Board of Internal Medicine, the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine, and the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education.
Clinical Experience
- Outpatient continuity clinic: You spend one half day per week seeing your own panel of patients in clinic at one of three ambulatory sites.
- Inpatient Palliative Care Consult Service (4 months): You work on a robust interdisciplinary team providing palliative care consultation to patients with a wide variety of illnesses. Our consult services care for patients and families at the Mount Sinai Hospital, Mount Sinai West, Mount Sinai Morningside, and Mount Sinai Beth Israel.
- Inpatient Palliative Care Unit (1 month): As the fellow on the inpatient Wiener Family Palliative Care Unit at the Mount Sinai Hospital, you provide complex symptom management and interdisciplinary end of life care to patients and their families on a 14-bed unit.
- James J. Peters Veterans Administration Medical Center Palliative Care (1 month)
You take primary responsibility for patients in the supportive care unit, the inpatient consult service, and the outpatient clinic, providing experience in long-term care and inpatient hospice. - Mount Sinai at Home (2 weeks)
You serve frail, chronically ill, and homebound patients throughout Manhattan with the Visiting Doctors and Palliative Care at Home teams. You learn about family and patient needs assessment in the home, the nature and availability of funded and unfunded support services in homecare settings, and the experience of living with and caring for serious illness outside of health care institutions. Most of these patients are not enrolled in hospice. - VNS Health (formerly Visiting Nurse Service of New York) (6 weeks)
VNS Health provides home hospice care throughout New York City for patients with all types of illnesses.. Through this program, you work with patients in their own homes and inpatient settings. You have the opportunity to see patients in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens and work closely with hospice nurses, social workers, chaplains and physicians. - Pediatric Palliative Care (2 weeks)
Committed to medically fragile children, we offer team-based trans-disciplinary care including medicine, nursing, social services, palliative care, mental health, rehabilitation, education, nutrition, child life and therapeutic activities, and pastoral care. - Elective Rotation (1 month)
During fellowship you have four weeks to spend on clinical electives of your choice. Fellows have the opportunity to design their own electives based on specific interest in addition to choosing from many established options. Previous fellows have elected to spend time learning about radiation oncology, interventional pain, integrative medicine, addiction medicine, and many other topics. In addition, fellows can choose to spend time on embedded palliative care teams within Heart Failure, the Surgical and Transplant ICUs, and the Medical ICU. - Supportive Oncology (1 month): Outpatient Supportive Oncology practices are embedded within Oncology at two sites in our health system. You work closely with an attending physician and interdisciplinary team to care for patients with cancer at both practices.
Non-Clinical Learning
As a fellow, you learn from a range of non-clinical learning experiences:
- Palliative Medicine Journal Club
Fellows lead the monthly interdisciplinary palliative medicine journal club, under supervision of a faculty member. - Didactic Lectures
We address a wide range of topics, including symptom management, functioning as a consultant, grief and bereavement, spiritual assessment, communication skills, pediatric palliative care, and cultural aspects of palliative care. Our curriculum is designed to prepare you for independent practice as a palliative care physician and for the HPM board exam. - Quarterly Fellows Meetings
All fellows meet to discuss the fellowship, reflect on the emotional nature of the work, and offer suggestions for improvement. - Bereavement Sessions
Facilitated by a certified grief therapist, these monthly sessions offer a space to reflect on the loss of a particular patient or address the feelings engendered by the complex nature of our work and its relationship to loss. - Weekly Palliative Care Meetings
Every week, you join the staff of the Lilian and Benjamin Hertzberg Palliative Care Institute to discuss clinical issues through clinical interdisciplinary conferences, clinical staff meetings, administrative conferences, and palliative care continuing education meetings. - Thursday Academic Half-Day
Once a week, all fellows are protected from clinical duties to participate in didactic and small group teaching sessions - Medical Student Teaching
As a fellow, you provide bedside teaching to medical students who rotate with us each week on the palliative care consult service. There are many opportunities to become involved in small group teaching for medical students. - Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Committee
Fellows have the opportunity to join the DEI committee in multiple activities and meetings every month, including the biweekly Humanities, Arts and Books Initiative and monthly forums to discuss equity in our community.
- Palliative Care Grand Rounds
These teaching conferences focus on a critical review of palliative care literature and academic research presentations by regional and national leaders in the field of palliative care. We also encourage you to attend geriatrics Grand Rounds.
Palliative Care Service Rotation
Palliative care is important to us, and we make sure that all of the students at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai gain experience learning about this area:
- Third-year medical students spend one week on the palliative care service.
- Geriatrics and hematology/oncology fellows rotate on our service.
- Fourth year medical students and house staff can do elective rotations on our service.