Mission:
The UCSF Hospice and Palliative Medicine Fellowship Program is devoted to training future leaders in Hospice and Palliative Medicine. Under the leadership of Dr. Steven Pantilat, UCSF offers a one-year clinical fellowship in Hospice and Palliative Medicine designed to qualify individuals for board certification.

Educational Goals:
Our goal is to train physicians in the care of patients with life-threatening illness by supporting the best quality of life throughout the course of an illness, and by managing factors that contribute to the suffering of the patient and the patient’s family.  Throughout the year, fellows will gain expertise in addressing the physical, psychological, social, and spiritual needs of their patients and their families, and in providing assistance with medical decision-making. 

The variety of clinical experiences, the faculty supervision provided to fellows, and our core curriculum will ensure that fellows become competent caring for patients with a broad range of diagnoses from diverse socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds. Our teaching sites care for a diverse set of patients from more than 20 ethnic groups across the full socioeconomic spectrum of the San Francisco community.   This diversity ensures that fellows care for patients with a broad range of ages, diagnoses, stages of illness, and palliative care needs including special populations such as the elderly and cognitively impaired, patients with HIV disease and patients with chemical dependency. 

Participating Institutions:
• UCSF Medical Center
• Mt. Zion Medical Center
• San Francisco VA Medical Center
• Kaiser Permanente Medical Center San Francisco
• George Mark Children's House

Fellowship Rotations:

• Inpatient palliative care rotation:
• Fellows will have a total of 24 weeks of inpatient acute care consultation experience through rotations on the UCSF Medical Center Palliative Care Service and the San Francisco VA Hospice & Palliative Care Service.  Fellows will see a wide-variety of patients through these distinct services, which include a 2-bed inpatient Palliative Care Unit (the Comfort Care Suites) at UCSF and a 10 bed inpatient hospice unit at the San Francisco VA.
• Home Hospice Rotation: 
• The fellows will spend 8 weeks at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center’s Hospice Agency, a Medicare certified program directed by Dr. Jeffrey Beane.  This home hospice agency has an average daily census of 40 patients and about 30 admissions per month.  The fellows will participate in weekly interdisciplinary case conferences and conduct home visits.  In addition fellows will care for patients in the home base palliative care program that integrates palliative care earlier in the continuum of care.
• Pediatric Palliative Care Rotation:
• Fellows will visit pediatric patients in home hospice as part of a requisite 4-week block at the George Mark Children's House (GMCH), a pediatric hospice and palliative care center. They will learn about and participate in GMCH’s broad array of services, which include residential respite support, transitional care between hospital and home, inpatient hospice, and home hospice care.
• Outpatient palliative care experience:
• Each fellow will have a weekly palliative care continuity clinic with the UCSF Symptom Management Service, a dedicated palliative care service based at UCSF’s Helen Diller Comprehensive Cancer Center.  This service provides a broad range of palliative interventions to patients with life threatening disease. Fellows will have ongoing responsibility for a panel of palliative care patients and evaluate several follow-up and new patients per clinic session.
• Elective Rotations:
• Fellows will have 10 weeks of elective time which will offer a wide range of clinical opportunities to fellows.  Standard electives may include: interventional pain management (inpatient and outpatient), radiation-oncology, pediatric respite and end-of-life care (GMCH), integrative medicine [Osher Center for Integrative Medicine (OCIM)], Art for Recovery, geriatrics, behavioral neurology and neuropsychiatry (UCSF Memory & Aging Clinic), Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (OCIM), psychotherapy and psychiatry (UCSF/Langley-Porter Psychiatry Institute’s inpatient psychiatry unit), psycho-oncology, and our HIV clinic.

Leadership:
Program Director
Steven Z. Pantilat, MD
Professor of Clinical Medicine
Director, Palliative Care Program and Palliative Care Leadership Center
Division of Hospital Medicine
521 Parnassus Ave., Suite C-126
UCSF, Box 0903
San Francisco, CA 94941
stevep@medicine.ucsf.edu

Associate Program Directors:
Dr. BJ Miller (bjmiller@medicine.ucsf.edu) and Dr. Eric Widera (eric.widera@ucsf.edu)

Kaiser Permanente Medical Center San Francisco Site Director:
Dr. Jeffrey Beane (Jeffrey.Beane@kp.org )
               

To Apply:

Applicants interested in pursuing training with the UCSF Palliative Medicine Fellowship should complete the following application and provide the requested information on single-sided 8.5 x 11” pages, without staples.  You may mail an original of this application or scan a signed copy and email it to:

Salina Ng
University of California, San Francisco
521 Parnassus Ave, Suite C-126
San Francisco, CA 94143-0903
salinang@medicine.ucsf.edu

Download Application here

For questions about the application or the program please email Dr. Eric Widera at eric.widera@ucsf.edu