Associate Program Director

Dear Prospective Fellows and Other Visitors,

Greetings and welcome to our website! I am a graduate of this program and now the Associate Program director (APD). We hope that in addition to providing you with some nuts and bolts of our fellowship, we can also give you a feel for what it’s like to be a Yale HPM fellow and member of our larger palliative care interdisciplinary team (IDT).

I frequently draw upon my own experiences as an HPM fellowship applicant in my current role as APD. I remember seeking a program that would provide me with a varied exposure to a spectrum of different illnesses. I sought a program which could provide me with the scholarly resources of a larger academic institution without sacrificing the feeling of a tight-knit group. I wanted to learn from the collective wisdom of a diverse multidisciplinary team composed of diverse members, each with their own unique and invaluable professional experiences. I hoped to be provided with a year-long experience that balanced time between palliative care and hospice experiences across inpatient and outpatient settings. Lastly, I looked for a diverse group of faculty with strong leadership of the educational and clinical programs. I identified that the Yale HPM program had all of these strengths and found it delivered on them all during my fellowship year.

As I embarked on my job search during fellowship, I was sure that I would be happiest continuing my career in HPM at Yale. I was excited at the idea of working together with my fellowship mentors in a clinical context but also to further our teaching mission. I knew that by staying at Yale, I could contribute to our growing program and further develop my fellowship research interest around the use of simulation in palliative care education.

Looking to the future, I am motivated by our mission to continue to provide a learning environment in which diverse fellows feel valued and well-supported by our whole team. I am proud that we provide our fellows with an appropriate level of autonomy that increases over the course of the year to allow graduates of our program to independently and confidently begin their practice in hospice and/or palliative medicine.

Warmly,
Dmitry Kozhevnikov, DO