For the past decade I have been teaching palliative care to professional colleagues from all over the world in an online MSc programme at Newcastle University. Our programme has always been online – quite revolutionary 15 years ago and certainly before covid entered our lives – so we have always benefitted from contributions from international students. Soon after I began teaching the Pain Management module, I realised that the prevalent UK-centric approach simply wasn’t appropriate when so many of my students simply didn’t have access to medicines and services which we consider essential to good palliative care.

The answer was to adopt learning designs that were participatory and socially-constructed, situated in meaningful clinical contexts and incorporating virtual spaces to share stories and learn from each other. In these spaces I heard stories about palliative care across the globe: some challenges we have in common, some illustrated the disparity between high- and low-income countries. Every narrative, however, seemed to be underpinned by a desire to do better.

The majority of our students come to us with the aim of professional development, many following good or bad experiences of palliative care. As they progress through the programme, I often notice a shift away from individual development to a desire to change the system within which they, as clinicians, operate. Reflecting on this has allowed me to appreciate that as educators, we have an opportunity to equip our students – doctors, nurses, pharmacists, paramedics, occupational therapists, psychologists and other members of the healthcare community – with the knowledge and skills to become palliative care advocates in their own corners of the world.

To do that, I had to learn about advocacy myself and in my next post I will describe what I’ve been doing to achieve this.