Palliative care is broad: you may need to explain its principles, assess symptoms, discuss difficult decisions and recognise when a patient needs urgent review. A useful study plan therefore needs more than a list of topics. It should make you retrieve key knowledge, apply it to cases, and revisit the areas where your answers are incomplete.
This six-week plan assumes about five hours of study each week, split into manageable sessions. Adjust the hours to fit your course and starting point. Check your course objectives and local clinical guidance for the scope of your assessment and for prescribing details: palliative care practice, medicine availability and protocols vary between countries.
Set up your study board
Start by gathering your own course material: lecture slides, relevant textbook or guideline extracts, seminar notes and photographs of handwritten notes. Sort them into a single board with sections that match the work you need to do. Keep each section focused enough to revise in one sitting.
A board on this topic ends up looking like this in MySummaries:
- Goal — improve quality of life for patients and families facing life-threatening illness
- Timing — can be provided alongside disease-directed treatment; it is not limited to the final days
- Approach — assess physical, psychological, social and spiritual needs
- Assess distress, function, likely cause and reversible contributors
- Use positioning, airflow from a fan where appropriate, reassurance and pacing
- Treat an underlying cause when consistent with goals; review the effect of each intervention
- Ask what matters most to the patient before choosing a symptom to address
- Characterise onset, severity, pattern, triggers, impact and previous treatment
- Check for reversible causes and treatment harms; agree how response will be reviewed
Ask permission to discuss concerns, find out what the patient understands, share information in manageable chunks and check understanding. Explore goals, capacity for the specific decision, and who the patient wants involved.
Clarify pain type, current medicines, benefit and adverse effects. For opioid-treated patients, check local guidance for starting, titration, breakthrough dosing, conversion and monitoring; do not convert opioids by memory alone.
Use your board as the source for revision, not as a substitute for clinical supervision. If your notes contain a drug dose, conversion or legal rule, check it against the current local source before learning it. For assessments, identify whether your course expects a particular guideline or framework and organise the board around that.
A six-week plan you can start this week
The schedule below uses five hours a week: five 50-minute sessions, with a short break between sessions if you combine them. Each session has one main task. Spend the final five minutes recording what remains uncertain; use that note to choose the next session’s focus.
Week 1: principles and a usable baseline
Session 1 — 50 minutes: Check your course objectives and gather your material. Make a list of the subjects your course covers, then divide your notes into board sections. Leave gaps where you need to find a source rather than guessing.
Session 2 — 50 minutes: Study the principles of palliative care. Practise explaining who may benefit, the role of family and carers, and how palliative care can accompany treatment aimed at the illness. Use your own words, then compare them with your notes.
Session 3 — 50 minutes: Learn a structured symptom assessment. Apply it to one case from your teaching material: what is the main problem, how does it affect the person, what might be reversible, and how will you review the plan?
Session 4 — 50 minutes: Do a closed-note recall of the first three sessions. Turn missed facts into questions, then check each answer against your material.
Session 5 — 50 minutes: Complete a short written case response. Mark it against the learning objectives: did you assess the patient’s priorities, include relevant causes, and give a review plan?
Week 2: pain and safe prescribing knowledge
Session 1: Review pain assessment, including the patient’s description, function, likely mechanism and treatment priorities.
Session 2: Study analgesic principles and the medicines covered by your course. Make a separate reference list for drug doses, opioid conversions and prescribing cautions; verify these from current local guidance.
Session 3: Work through two pain cases. For each, state what you would clarify, what you would check before changing treatment, and how you would monitor benefit and harm.
Session 4: Use flashcards for key distinctions and recall, not for unverified prescribing tables. Grade each answer honestly and revisit the difficult cards.
Session 5: Write a brief plan for a case involving persistent pain despite treatment. Include reassessment, adverse effects, the patient’s goals and when you would seek advice.
Week 3: common symptoms beyond pain
Session 1: Review breathlessness: assessment, possible reversible causes, non-drug measures and how distress affects the patient.
Session 2: Study nausea and vomiting using the causes and treatment approaches in your course material. Avoid learning a single antiemetic choice as universal; the likely cause, contraindications and local guidance matter.
Session 3: Review constipation, fatigue or another symptom emphasised in your syllabus. Build a brief assessment-and-review pathway from your notes.
Session 4: Compare cases with similar symptoms but different likely causes. Practise saying what extra information would change your approach.
Session 5: Complete a timed case response, then identify whether missed points came from knowledge, prioritisation or unclear wording.
Week 4: communication, capacity and planning
Session 1: Practise opening a conversation about illness understanding and concerns. Use open questions, pause for the patient’s response, and check what they want to know.
Session 2: Study how to discuss goals and future care in a way that reflects the patient’s preferences. Use the communication guidance taught in your course.
Session 3: Review decision-making capacity as it is defined in the relevant legal and educational framework for your country. Do not assume one country’s rules apply elsewhere.
Session 4: Practise a conversation with a study partner or by recording yourself. Listen for interruptions, unexplained jargon and whether you checked understanding.
Session 5: Write a case response about a disagreement or uncertainty. State whose views you would seek, what the patient has expressed, and what needs clarification.
Week 5: care near the end of life and support for families
Session 1: Review how to recognise a possible change in the patient’s condition and what assessment is needed. Distinguish clinical findings from assumptions about prognosis.
Session 2: Study the care priorities and symptom issues included in your course’s end-of-life teaching. Confirm treatment details with local guidance.
Session 3: Review family and carer support, including how to ask about needs and explain uncertainty sensitively.
Session 4: Practise a case discussion that includes the patient’s priorities, a symptom plan and a review or escalation plan.
Session 5: Revisit the cards you have repeatedly missed. Explain each answer aloud, then check the exact wording or fact in your notes.
Week 6: integrate, test and repair gaps
Session 1: Complete a mixed set of questions or cases drawn from your course objectives, without consulting notes during the attempt.
Session 2: Mark your answers against your material. Separate missing knowledge from weak application: for example, knowing a symptom list is different from explaining which questions matter for this patient.
Session 3: Spend the session on your weakest section. Re-read only the relevant source, then answer a fresh case on that topic.
Session 4: Practise a short oral explanation: assessment, priorities, options, risks and review. Record it if useful and listen for unsupported certainty.
Session 5: Do a final retrieval session across all board sections. Make a concise list of unresolved details to check with your course materials or supervisor.
Keep the workload pointed at your weak areas
At the end of each study week, review what is due and choose the next task based on evidence, not preference. A clear queue helps you avoid spending every session on familiar topics. In MySummaries, the due view for this subject could look like this:
Before a focused session, identify the section that is costing you marks or producing repeated card errors. Use your own recent attempts to decide whether the problem is recall, application or communication. In MySummaries, the section picker might direct the next revision session towards a repeatedly missed topic:
Pain and opioids · Struggling — 4 of 9 cards were missed, and the last case answer omitted monitoring and review
A weak-area report is useful only if it changes what you do next. For example, if communication is your lowest-scoring section, do not respond by rereading symptom notes. Practise a conversation, review the relevant feedback, and try a different case. MySummaries’ report can make that pattern visible across your attempts:
How MySummaries helps
MySummaries turns your PDFs, slides and photographed notes into revision boards, then uses those boards for spaced-repetition cards, written practice and recorded oral practice. For this plan, use your board to organise course material, cards to revisit facts, and marked cases to decide which topic to study next. Verify clinical details against current local guidance and your course requirements.