Integration of the Verbatim Exercise into a Hospice and Palliative Medicine Fellowship.

One of the more challenging aspects of specialty level training in any medical fellowship is learning to communicate mindfully and effectively with patients and families in the face of serious illness. For the past five years, our accredited Hospice and Palliative Medicine (HPM) fellowship program has been integrating the "verbatim"-an exercise with a long and integral history in the training of health care chaplains. Verbatims are word-for-word accounts of a clinician's encounter with a patient and/or the patient's family.