ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the challenges of teaching symptom management, and provides an overview of the range and quality of teaching methods currently available. Patients with advanced progressive diseases frequently experience multiple, complex symptoms. Although pain is often reported as the most prevalent and most feared symptom, non-pain symptoms are common in palliative care patients. The chapter explores current practice in symptom management education and identifies those methods that have been found to be most successful. Different priorities in patient management, as well as lack of knowledge and skills, individual opinions and the culture of the workplace, can create barriers to the provision of good symptom management. Learning in a clinical setting has many advantages. It is focused on real problems in the context of actual practice and takes into account the practitioner's own anxieties and emotions, a dimension less easily accessed by simulated situations.
