Palliative care seeks to optimize quality of life and relieve physical and emotional suffering through pain management, comfort care, and spiritual support. A 2010 survey of patients receiving palliative care found that 40% spoke limited English. Since palliative care depends on regular, clear communication between patients, providers, and families, interpreters are key members of any palliative care team.

For interpreters, conversations involving palliative care, especially those at the end of life, can be among the most difficult to convey — not only linguistically and culturally, but personally. Yet to date, there has been little training for interpreters in this field.

This seven-hour workshop curriculum is free and can be downloaded. Note that the curriculum was designed for health care interpreter trainers for use in preparing experienced medical interpreters to work in palliative care settings. An online version of this course designed specifically for health care interpreters is in development and will be available in the near future.

The languages included are traditional Chinese, simplified Chinese, Korean, Russian, Spanish, Tagalog, and Vietnamese. These languages were chosen because they are the most common non-English languages spoken in California.

How to Use the Curriculum

The curriculum comprises four pieces:

1. The lessons document, including helpful samples for a student survey, class outline and template, workshop schedule, sign-in sheet, and detailed lesson plans, is available as a PDF under Document Downloads. It totals 74 pages and is formatted for double-sided printing.
2. The handouts document, including the interpreting practice dialogues in the various target languages, is available as a PDF under Document Downloads. It totals 200 pages and is formatted for double-sided printing.
3. The presentation slides provide an introductory lecture on palliative care and are available as a PowerPoint file under Document Downloads.
4. The videos, used in Lesson 2, are available below to view or download the files.

How to Use the Videos

Three videos are used in Lesson 2. You can view them below in the players on this page.

You may also download the MP4 files to your computer for use in the classroom. We recommend that on the Download Video links below, you right click to "save target as" and save the MP4 file to your local computer.

Note (12-2-2011): CHCF has been notified that the Vietnamese translations in the document have corrupted fonts and are not usable. Please check back later for the updated version.