Identification of missed opportunities during ICU family conferences provides suggestions for improving communication during these conferences. Future studies are needed to demonstrate whether addressing these opportunities will improve quality of care.

Several areas emerged for physicians to focus their attention on when communicating with dying patients. These findings provide guidance in how to improve this communication. They also highlight the need to approach communication about end-of-life care as a spectrum that requires attention from the time of a terminal diagnosis through death.

BACKGROUND: A framework for understanding and evaluating physicians' skills at providing end-of-life care from the perspectives of patients, families, and health care workers will promote better quality of care at the end of life.

No abstract

This study found important variability in the ways different patients with life-limiting illnesses approach the interaction of wanting support for hope and prognostic information from their clinicians. The four-diagram approach may help clinicians understand individual patients and families, but further research is needed to determine the utility of these diagrams for improving communication about end-of-life care.