Education on palliative care for Parkinson patients: development of the “Best care for people with late-stage Parkinson’s disease” curriculum toolkit

Background Palliative care education among all stakeholders involved in the care of patients with late-stage Parkinson’s disease is not adequate. In fact, there are many unmet educational and training needs as confirmed with a targeted, narrative literature review. Methods To address these needs we have developed the “Best Care for People with Late-Stage Parkinson’s Disease” curriculum toolkit. The toolkit is based on recommendations and guidelines for training clinicians and other healthcare professionals involved in palliative care, educational material developed in recent research efforts for patients and caregivers with PD and consensus meetings of leading experts in the field. The final version of the proposed toolkit was drafted after an evaluation by external experts with an online survey, the feedback of which was statistically analysed with the chi-square test of independence to assess experts’ views on the relevance and importance of the topics. A sentiment analysis was also done to complement statistics and assess the experts positive and negative sentiments for the curriculum topics based on their free text feedback. Results The toolkit is compliant with Kern’s foundational framework for curriculum development, recently adapted to online learning. The statistical analysis of the online survey, aiming at toolkit evaluation from external experts (27 in total), confirms that all but one (nutrition in advanced Parkinson’s disease) topics included, as well as their objectives and content, are highly relevant and useful. Conclusions In this paper, the methods for the development of the toolkit, its stepwise evolution, as well as the toolkit implementation as a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), are presented. The “Best Care for People with Late-Stage Parkinson’ s disease” curriculum toolkit can provide high-quality and equitable education, delivered by an interdisciplinary team of educators. The toolkit can improve communication about palliative care in neurological conditions at international and multidisciplinary level. It can also offer continuing medical education for healthcare providers.