Clinical Experience & Rotations

You will join the UVM Medical Center Inpatient Palliative Care team at the University of Vermont Medical Center, an academic, 620-bed, tertiary care and Level I Trauma Center, that provides tertiary care for over 1 million people in the Upstate New York and Vermont regions. During this rotation, you will have the opportunity to collaborate with teams and learners across the hospital to assist in the care of adults with serious illness. The inpatient palliative care service has two teams: one embedded on the Cancer unit and the other team covering the ICUs, ED, and the rest of the Medical/ Surgical units.”

The McClure Miller Respite House is Vermont’s only Medicare-certified inpatient hospice residence. During this rotation, you will hone your skills in symptom management and goals of care at the end-of-life care. Fellows will become part of an interprofessional team of nurses, chaplains, social workers, bereavement counselors, and volunteers to provide high-quality care to residents and families in a unique environment designed for person-centered end of life care.

This rotation will give you the chance to work with our community-based hospice-team, to hone your skills in providing end-of life care at home and in nursing facilities, and to become familiar with the Medicare Hospice Benefit and regulatory world of hospice care. This experience is provided through the University of Vermont Health Network Home Health & Hospice, a Medicare-certified hospice program serving Chittenden and Grand Isle Counties. Fellows will participate in weekly interdisciplinary conferences and conduct visits with members of the hospice team to support hospice patients and their caregivers wherever they call home.

During your community-based palliative care rotations, you will practice palliative medicine at Porter Medical Center, a 25-bed critical access hospital, and Helen Porter Rehabilitation and Nursing Facility, a 105-bed nursing home, both located in Middlebury, Vermont. Clinical experiences here will strengthen your expertise in guiding transitions of care and delivering specialty palliative care across diverse settings with the help of community partners, including close collaboration with local hospice agencies and not-for-profit and volunteer organizations. Working with patients and interdisciplinary teams in rural hospital and long-term care environments will enhance your ability to facilitate goals of care discussions and advocate for patient-centered care through the continuum of serious illness.

Patients in rural settings often have limited access to palliative care and hospice services. We have designed this rotation to allow you to not only experience rural hospice and palliative care, but also to understand how to best support patients who are further away from major medical centers. Through a partnership with AHEC, fellows will stay in a rural community and work with a rural hospice and palliative care team, including a physician, experiencing a variety of clinical settings (e.g. home, skilled nursing facilities, critical access hospitals). You will also create and share in a rural narrative medicine project to better understand the needs of rural patients. Currently our fellows rotate for 2 weeks in the Southwest regions of Vermont.

The Pediatric Advanced Care Team at the Golisano Children’s Hospital provides specialized, longitudinal pediatric care for children and their caregivers throughout Vermont and Northern New York. You will have a dedicated 2-week block to care for pediatric patients with serious illness in the general inpatient ward, pediatric intensive care unit, neonatal intensive care unit, and the outpatient setting. You will have the opportunity to work alongside our pediatric palliative care experts as well as nurses, social workers, and child life specialists in the care of children with complex illness.

Examples of available electives, including integrative pain management at the Osher Center for Integrative Health, acute and interventional pain, radiation oncology, ethics consultation and addiction medicine. We additionally offer pediatric electives in heme oncology, intensive care, pulmonology, neurology, or emergency medicine. Depending on your personalized learning objectives, we can partner to unique electives that meet your own educational goals.