Resources · For educators

Surgical Palliative Care Resource Hub

Teaching resources for the intersection of surgery and palliative care. A place to share practical tools, learn from one another, and strengthen how we teach serious-illness care.

A teaching collection curated by Heather Logghe, MD

Published resources

From organizations and publishers

Established, published teaching resources. They live on their creators’ websites, and I link to them where they are. Everything listed here can be used without paying; if a resource asks for registration or a form, I’ve noted it.

Understanding surgical decisions

Three places to start when teaching how surgeons and patients weigh an operation: the conversation before consent, a framework for high-stakes choices, and guidance for older adults after injury.

Teaching primary palliative care across disciplines

For educators teaching the foundational palliative care skills every clinician needs, in nursing, medicine, surgery, and the rest of the care team. These resources are written for any specialty; the surgery-specific tools are listed alongside them below. Why these skills belong to everyone is on Primary Palliative Care.

All published resources

  • Surgical Palliative Care: Surgeon’s Guide and Curriculum

    American College of Surgeons

    Modules on palliative care through a surgical lens, each with learning objectives, case scenarios, pre- and post-tests, and slides for teaching.

    Format
    Modules and slide decks (PDF)
    Audience
    Surgical residents, surgeons, and surgical educators
    Communication · Goals & surgical decisions · Prognosis · Family & surrogate decisions · Symptoms · Surgery-specific View resource

  • Better Conversations for Better Informed Consent

    University of Wisconsin–Madison, Patient Preferences Project

    Teaching videos and slides for discussing surgery, alternatives, and possible outcomes during informed consent.

    Format
    Videos and slides
    Audience
    Surgeons and palliative care clinicians
    Communication · Goals & surgical decisions · Surgery-specific View resource

  • Best Case/Worst Case: High-Stakes Surgical Decisions

    University of Wisconsin–Madison, Patient Preferences Project

    A framework for explaining possible outcomes and helping patients choose treatments that fit their priorities.

    Format
    Videos, teaching manuals, practice cases, checklist, and pocket card
    Audience
    Surgeons and palliative care clinicians
    Access
    Registration required for the full toolkit.
    Communication · Goals & surgical decisions · Prognosis · Family & surrogate decisions · Surgery-specific View resource

  • VitalTalk Quick Guides

    VitalTalk

    Short, step-by-step guides for serious news, prognosis, goals of care, family conferences, conflict, and talking about dying.

    Format
    Quick guides (web)
    Audience
    Clinicians in any specialty
    Communication · Prognosis · Goals & surgical decisions · Family & surrogate decisions · All disciplines View resource

  • Serious Illness Conversation Guide

    Ariadne Labs

    A structured conversation guide for exploring a patient’s understanding, goals, worries, and trade-offs.

    Format
    Conversation guide (PDF)
    Audience
    Clinicians in any specialty
    Access
    A short download form.
    Communication · Goals & surgical decisions · Prognosis · All disciplines View resource

  • Best Case/Worst Case, with Dr. Gretchen Schwarze

    Behind the Knife, episode 380

    The creator of the Best Case/Worst Case tool on helping older patients make high-risk surgical decisions that fit their goals.

    Format
    Podcast episode · 48 min
    Audience
    Surgeons and surgical trainees; useful for palliative care teams
    Goals & surgical decisions · Communication · Surgery-specific View resource

  • ACS Best Practices Guidelines in Geriatric Trauma Management

    American College of Surgeons, 2023 update

    Guidance on caring for older trauma patients, including treatment decisions, prognosis, family involvement, and symptom management.

    Format
    Guideline (PDF)
    Audience
    Surgeons, with useful clinical context for palliative care clinicians
    Trauma & critical care · Prognosis · Goals & surgical decisions · Family & surrogate decisions · Symptoms · Surgery-specific View resource

  • ACS TQIP Palliative Care Best Practices Guidelines

    American College of Surgeons, 2017

    Palliative care in trauma: the interdisciplinary team, breaking bad news, goals-of-care conversations, end-of-life care, and special populations.

    Format
    Guideline (PDF)
    Audience
    Trauma surgeons and trauma teams
    Trauma & critical care · Communication · Goals & surgical decisions · Surgery-specific View resource

  • Fast Facts and Concepts

    Palliative Care Network of Wisconsin

    Hundreds of concise, evidence-based summaries on palliative care topics, filterable by specialty, including surgery.

    Format
    One-page summaries (web)
    Audience
    Clinicians in any specialty, including surgery
    Symptoms · Prognosis · Communication · All disciplines View resource

  • VitalTalk Tips app

    VitalTalk

    A phone app with concise, evidence-based tips for specific conversations, for the moment before you walk in.

    Format
    App (iPhone and Android)
    Audience
    Clinicians in any specialty
    Communication · All disciplines View resource

  • Training All Clinicians in Palliative Care Skills

    Center to Advance Palliative Care (CAPC)

    A toolkit for training clinicians from every specialty and discipline in communication and shared decision-making, pain and symptom management, and caregiver support, with clinical training recommendations by discipline.

    Format
    Toolkit: training recommendations, implementation guides, and conversation and prescribing aids (web)
    Audience
    Educators and health systems training clinicians in every discipline
    Access
    The toolkit page is free to view; CAPC’s online courses are mostly available through member organizations.
    Communication · Symptoms · All disciplines View resource
The Hub

Shared by educators

Teaching materials individual educators have made and chosen to share, each with credit and clear permissions. It begins with three of my own teaching sessions, simply because they’re the ones I have. The first, Code, Cut, or Comfort, is ready to download; the other two are still being prepared. The next ones, I hope, will come from you.

  • Available · Version 0.1

    Code, Cut, or Comfort: Goal-Concordant Care

    How surgeons connect operative options, expected recovery, and uncertainty to what matters most to a patient, including when an operation isn’t chosen.

    Audience
    Surgery and emergency medicine residents, surgeons, and interprofessional educators
    Format
    Facilitated slides, discussion, and paired practice
    Time
    20–25 minutes Designed length; not yet test-taught
    Slides and educator guide (PDF) View and download →
  • In preparation

    Palliative Care in Trauma Surgery and Critical Care

    An introduction to palliative care in acute surgical illness, with attention to communication, decision-making, and care in the ICU.

    Audience
    To be confirmed
    Format
    Slides, being redesigned as a teaching module
    Time
    To be confirmed
    Not yet available to download View details →
  • In preparation

    Prognosis: Doctor, How Long Do I Have?

    Conversations about prognosis and uncertainty, grounded in what patients want to understand and what matters to them.

    Audience
    To be confirmed
    Format
    Slides, being redesigned as a teaching module
    Time
    To be confirmed
    Not yet available to download View details →
Foundations

Key resources in surgical palliative care

Surgical palliative care isn’t new. Surgeons and palliative care clinicians have been building this field for more than 25 years, from the American College of Surgeons’ 1998 end-of-life principles to a research agenda updated this month. These are the statements, guides, communities, and papers I return to most. Each links to its original publisher; a few articles need a subscription.

Statements, standards, and guides

Organizations and communities

Landmark papers and reviews

In order of publication, to show how the field grew.

  1. Introduction and historical background of palliative care: where does the surgeon fit in? Dunn GP, Milch RA. J Am Coll Surg. 2001;193(3):325–328.
  2. Palliative care by the surgeon: how to do it Dunn GP, Milch RA, Mosenthal AC, et al. J Am Coll Surg. 2002;194(4):509–537.
  3. Office of Promoting Excellence in End-of-Life Care: Surgeon’s Palliative Care Workgroup report from the field Surgeons Palliative Care Workgroup. J Am Coll Surg. 2003;197(4):661–686.
  4. Changing the culture around end-of-life care in the trauma intensive care unit Mosenthal AC, Murphy PA, Barker LK, et al. J Trauma. 2008;64(6):1587–1593.
  5. Surgical palliative care: recent trends and developments Dunn GP. Surg Clin North Am. 2011;91(2):277–292.
  6. The intensity and variation of surgical care at the end of life: a retrospective cohort study Kwok AC, Semel ME, Lipsitz SR, et al. Lancet. 2011;378(9800):1408–1413.
  7. Integrating palliative care in the surgical and trauma intensive care unit Mosenthal AC, Weissman DE, Curtis JR, et al. IPAL-ICU Project Advisory Board and the Center to Advance Palliative Care. Crit Care Med. 2012;40(4):1199–1206.
  8. Beyond 30-day mortality: aligning surgical quality with outcomes that patients value Schwarze ML, Brasel KJ, Mosenthal AC. JAMA Surg. 2014;149(7):631–632.
  9. Recommendations for best communication practices to facilitate goal-concordant care for seriously ill older patients with emergency surgical conditions Cooper Z, Koritsanszky LA, Cauley CE, et al. Ann Surg. 2016;263(1):1–6.
  10. Palliative care interventions for surgical patients: a systematic review Lilley EJ, Khan KT, Johnston FM, et al. JAMA Surg. 2016;151(2):172–183.
  11. A framework to improve surgeon communication in high-stakes surgical decisions: Best Case/Worst Case Taylor LJ, Nabozny MJ, Steffens NM, et al. JAMA Surg. 2017;152(6):531–538.
  12. Palliative care in surgery: defining the research priorities Lilley EJ, Cooper Z, Schwarze ML, Mosenthal AC. Ann Surg. 2018;267(1):66–72.
  13. Development of surgical palliative care as a field and community building in palliative care: past, present, and future directions McCammon SD, Hoffman MR. Ann Palliat Med. 2022;11(2):852–861.
  14. Historical notes on the founding of the Surgical Palliative Care Society Hinshaw DB. Am Surg. 2023;89(5):1334–1337.
  15. Defining the time-limited trial for patients with critical illness: an official American Thoracic Society workshop report Kruser JM, Ashana DC, Courtright KR, et al. Ann Am Thorac Soc. 2024;21(2):187–199.
  16. Palliative care in surgery: updated research priorities from the Surgical Palliative Care Research Expert Consensus Conference Wong BO, Hoffman DI, Williams K, et al. J Am Coll Surg. 2026, online ahead of print.

See all in the Evidence Library →

Prognosis tools

Validated prognostic tools

Published, validated tools for estimating prognosis and surgical risk in older adults and people with serious illness. Each estimates outcomes for groups of similar patients. None replaces clinical judgment, or a conversation about what matters to the person in front of you. I link to each tool’s official source rather than reproducing it here. Some, including the Palliative Performance Scale and the Clinical Frailty Scale, ask for permission before clinical or teaching use.

Palliative and serious-illness prognosis

Surgical risk

Frailty and comorbidity

For palliative care clinicians

Surgery, for palliative care teams

Most of what’s here is written with surgeons in mind. This section is meant to go the other direction: teaching for palliative care clinicians about what common operations involve, what recovery really looks like, how surgeons weigh risk, and when to bring a surgeon into the conversation.

A place to start

This section is just beginning. If you teach palliative care teams about surgery, I’d love to hear what you use.

Contribute

Help shape the Hub.

Have a resource you return to, a case that helps learners think, or a topic that needs a better starting point? A link to something you already teach from is a complete contribution. You don’t need to build anything new.

  • Recommend a public resourceSomething you already teach from, published on a public website or in a journal.
  • Share teaching materialsSlides, a case, or an exercise you created and would like other educators to use.
  • Suggest a topicA gap you keep running into when you teach.
  • Help review a moduleClinical or educational review of a draft before it’s shared.

You keep ownership of anything you share, and every resource carries the credit you agree to.

Send a suggestion

Please don’t include patient information. No names, photos, dates, record details, or anything else that could identify someone. This form doesn’t accept files. If you’re offering materials, describe them here and I’ll arrange a private way to look at them.

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Does it include real patient material, photos, recordings, or content made by someone else?No details needed here. I’ll talk it through with you before anything is shared.
Permissions, one decision at a time

Each question is separate. A yes to one is not a yes to the others, and every answer applies only to the resource you named. If you’re recommending someone else’s public resource, skip this part; I’ll only link to it where it already lives.

May I link to it? I’d list its title, your credit, a short description, and a link to where it already lives.
May I host a copy? I’d keep an approved copy of the version you choose so people can view it here.
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May it be adapted? Adapting means changing it, for example shortening it or swapping in a local case.

Sending a suggestion doesn’t publish it or transfer ownership. I review everything before anything is shared.

An independent educational project, initiated and curated by Heather Logghe, MD. This is my curated resource collection, not the official website of any society, community, or group, including any that use a similar name. Organizational affiliations don’t imply sponsorship or endorsement, and listing a resource doesn’t mean its creators or publishers endorse this collection.

These materials support teaching and don’t replace clinical judgment for a particular patient. Permissions differ by resource; check each resource’s page before copying, sharing, or adapting anything.