Introduction:

Due to sociodemographic changes in the population, palliative care is an indispensable tool to the health professionals. The clinical simulation reproduces real situations, allowing to integrate the areas or domains that compose the competency in palliative care. The objective is to evaluate the care of the patient in a terminal situation through clinical simulation.

Subjects and methods:

Descriptive study with undergraduate medical interns (sixth year) of the School of Medicine of the Universidad of Yucatan. Three domains of the competency in palliative care were evaluated with a checklist with a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.928 and a CCI of 0.562.

Results:

Seven students (5.11%) showed competency for the attention in palliative care with a 100% of the items of the checklist, otherwise, 47 participants (34.3%) showed developing competency in palliative care with a performance greater or equal to 80% of the items, thus, 83 students (60%) obtain less than 80% of the items, showing deficiency in the competency. The domain with best performance was ‘breaking bad news’, with all elements above 80%, and the worst performance was ‘managing emotional contagion’, with no-item above 80%.

Conclusions:

Evaluation through clinical simulation of the competency in palliative care allows to integrate in one scenario the elements of the competency, facilitating the analysis and the medical student’s feedback, for its use is strongly recommended during the evaluation process.

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