• Posted January 16, 2026

Medical Students Not Being Adequately Trained To Confront Death, Review Finds

Doctors encounter death more than people in nearly all other lines of work.

That’s the price they pay for a career spent saving lives and helping people.

But modern medical education leaves doctors little-prepared for this inevitable challenge, a new evidence review says.

There’s minimal evidence-based education available to medical students regarding how to help patients and families navigate the end of life, researchers recently reported in Academic Medicine.

This short-changes future doctors as much as it does their patients, researchers said.

“Training can help a doctor decrease the fear of death for patients and their families, but it also reduces that fear for the medical professional,” said senior researcher Raven Weaver, an associate professor in Washington State University’s Department of Human Development in Pullman, Washington.

“Medical students often don’t get enough experience with this until they’re practicing in the field,” Weaver said in a news release. “Classroom training could get them thinking about the issue before they face it directly with patients.”

For their review, researchers analyzed published papers dating back to 2013 on death and dying education provided by medical schools. They wound up with 43 studies in all.

All told, their review showed that medical schools vary widely in how they teach about death or dying, researchers found.

Some stuck to the basics, teaching students how to fill out a death certificate, define end-of-life care or describe an advanced directive.

Others provided expanded real-world training, including a one-week rotation in a hospice or a required third-year rotation in palliative care.

But “there was not a consistent, evidence-based approach to death and dying education in U.S. medical schools,” researchers concluded.

Any such education on death and dying tended to be short in duration, likely leaving little lasting impact, researchers said.

“The first step in figuring out how to teach it is to see how it’s currently being taught,” lead researcher Dr. Logan Patterson, a recent Washington State University graduate, said in a news release. “We found that it really isn’t being taught at all.”

Patterson, who is to start radiation oncology training in San Francisco later this year, has firsthand experience with how inadequate training can leave future doctors unprepared.

“If you do one shift in an emergency room, you’ll likely see a patient who hasn’t grappled with end-of-life questions,” he said in a news release.

“Several times I saw families bring a patient with a chronic condition to the hospital because they thought that’s what the person wanted, only to learn they didn’t want to be there,” Patterson said. “Better training for doctors could head off the confusion before it becomes a time-sensitive condition in the hospital.”

Additional training — either during medical school or while in practice — could reduce unwanted treatment and save families from unnecessary medical bills, Weaver said.

“Research shows that health care is most expensive in the last year of life, and a lot of that is unwanted treatment,” she said. “Physicians, understandably, want to save lives. But they often don’t consider quality of life.”

This training would also help doctors deal with the emotional strain of seeing patients and families through this inescapable part of life, Patterson said.

“I think almost any doctor will tell you there’s a lack of death and dying training,” Patterson said. “It’s inevitable that doctors will talk about this with patients. Any boost of knowledge early in their careers will only help them and those they care for.”

More information

The National Institute on Aging has more on end-of-life care.

SOURCE: Washington State University, news release, Jan. 14, 2026