2025 marks 10 years of the provincial UBC IMG Resident Orientation, and BCCPC’s Serious Illness Conversation (SIC) Workshop has been an integral session in the orientation since 2019. Since then, a total of 360 IMG residents have participated in the SIC Workshop as part of the orientation.
The Serious Illness Workshop helps clinicians elicit the patient’s understanding of their illness, their decision-making preferences, share information on prognosis or function, understand goals, fears, explore views on trade-offs and impaired function, and identify wishes and next steps for family involvement.
The SIC Workshop has proven to be incredibly valuable for IMGs entering residency in Canada. They report gaining confidence in initiating difficult end-of-life goals conversations with patients, and being motivated to incorporate the SIC framework into their practice.
Here are some comments received over the years:
Great resource for IMGs, as the method of breaking bad news and having difficult conversations was taught in a great manner, important as some IMGs like myself have come from countries where this is not practiced, and having someone demonstrate it live was excellent and made the material real and easy to understand.
AMAZING BREAKOUT SESSIONS. Really enjoyed having the time to practice SIC skills and the facilitator we had did an amazing job.
Very helpful and wonderful, engaging workshop! This is a heavy topic that was presented in a palatable and accessible way! Thank you!
Very good when they had a live simulated conversation in front of us, instead of showing a pre-recorded video. Really showed at-the-time authenticity and how a real conversation would flow rather than appearing very scripted. Thank you!
This session was EXCELLENT, I really appreciated being able to role play and see how going through the script would feel.
Find out more about our Serious Illness Conversations resources.
