Comparison of Goals of Care Between Hemodialysis Patients and Their Health Care Providers: A Survey

Video tools in pediatric goals of care communication: A systematic review

•Goals of Care resources are primarily in written format and for adult patients.•Video tools can support families of pediatric patients facing prognostic uncertainty.•Videos represent an effective but underutilized Goals of Care communication tool.

Goals of care discussions in acute hospital admissions - Qualitative description of perspectives from patients, family and their doctors

OBJECTIVE

Goals of care discussions guide care for hospital inpatients at risk of deterioration. We aimed to explore patient and family experience of goals of care during the first 72 h of admission along with their doctor's perspective.

METHODS

A qualitative descriptive study. Patients, family and doctors who participated in a goals of care discussion during an acute hospital admission at an Australian tertiary teaching hospital were interviewed in 2019.

RESULTS

Many participants found goals of care discussions appropriate and reported understanding. However, communication was commonly procedure-focused, with questioning about preferences for cardiopulmonary resuscitation and intubation. Some considered the discussion as inapplicable to their state of health, and occasionally surprising. Participants commonly related goals of care with death, and without context, this led to fear of abandonment. Previous experience with end of life care influenced decision-making. Preference for family presence was clear.

CONCLUSIONS

This study identifies deficiencies in goals of care communication in the acute hospital setting. Discussions are life-saving-procedure focused, leading to poor understanding and potentially distress, and jeopardising patient-centred care.

PRACTICE IMPLICATIONS

Assessment of patient values and clear communication on the aims of goals of care discussions is essential to optimise patient and institutional outcomes. Clinicians should consider environment and invite family participation.

Understanding patients' end-of-life goals of care in the emergency department

BACKGROUND

Emergency departments (ED) are frequently the entryway to the health system for older, more ill patients. Because decisions made in the ED often influence escalation of care both in the ED and after admission, it is important for emergency physicians to understand their patients' goals of care.

STUDY OBJECTIVES

To determine how well emergency physicians understand their patients' goals of care.

METHODS

This was a prospective survey study of a convenience sample of ED patients 65 years and older presenting between February 18 and March 1, 2019 to an academic center with 77,000 annual visits. If a patient did not have decision-making capacity, a surrogate decision-maker was interviewed when possible. Two sets of surveys were designed, one for patients and one for physicians. The patient survey included questions regarding their goals of care and end-of-life care preferences. The physician survey asked physicians to select which goals of care were important to their patients and to identify which was the most important. Patient-physician agreement on patients' most important goal of care was analyzed with Cohen's kappa.

RESULTS

A total of 111 patient participants were invited to complete the survey, of whom 80 (72%) agreed to participate. The patients consisted of 43 women and 37 men with an age range from 65 to 98 years. Additionally, 16 attending and 14 resident physicians participated in the study for a total of 49 attending responses and 41 resident responses. A total of 88% of patients believed it was either very important or important to discuss goals of care with their physicians. Both patients and physicians most frequently chose "Improve or maintain function, quality of life, or independence" as the most important goal; however, there was wide variation in patient responses. Patients and attending physicians selected the same most important goal of care in 20% of cases (kappa 0.03) and patients and resident physicians selected the same goal in 27% of cases (kappa 0.11).

CONCLUSIONS

We found poor agreement between patients and physicians in the ED regarding patients' most important goal of care. Additionally, we found that most patients visiting the ED believe it is important to discuss goals of care with their physicians. Future work may focus on interventions to facilitate goals of care discussions in the ED.

Caring for Pregnant Patients With CKD---An Ethical Discussion of 5 Cases

Introduction

Pregnancy planning in patients with chronic kidney disease can result in ethical conflicts due to the potential for adverse outcomes. Traditionally, many nephrologists have advised their patients to avoid pregnancy altogether; however, this approach is paternalistic and not patient-centered. An ethical framework could guide joint decision-making between physicians and their patients, but this does not currently exist.

Methods

We performed a literature search to identify the ethical considerations associated with this patient population. We searched for articles published between 1975 and 2019 using the terms “ethics” and “high risk pregnancy,” along with 29 chronic disease-specific MeSH terms. Subsequently, we performed a critical evaluation using established ethical theories and adapted anonymized clinical cases from the Pregnancy in Kidney Disease Clinic (PreKid Clinic) at our institution to guide the discussion.

Results

We identified 968 articles and excluded 947 based on their title or abstract. Twelve full-text articles were included, representing discussions, case reports, and literature reviews on the ethics of pregnancy in 8 chronic diseases. The extracted data were applied to 5 clinical cases to guide the discussion.

Conclusions

This clinical review focuses on 3 main ethical themes: duty to patient, duty to the fetus, and duty to society, to help physicians explore common scenarios that may arise when counseling patients around pregnancy. Primarily, physicians have a duty to facilitate autonomous decision-making and informed consent. Secondarily, they have a duty to protect the fetus and use resources judiciously as long as it does not impact the care of their patients.

Use and Meaning of "Goals of Care" in the Healthcare Literature: a Systematic Review and Qualitative Discourse Analysis

BACKGROUND

The specific phrase "goals of care" (GOC) is pervasive in the discourse about serious illness care. Yet, the meaning of this phrase is ambiguous. We sought to characterize the use and meaning of the phrase GOC within the healthcare literature to improve communication among patients, families, clinicians, and researchers.

METHODS

A systematic review of the English language healthcare literature indexed in MEDLINE/PubMed, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL), and Scopus was performed in October of 2018. We searched for all publications with the exact phrase "goals of care" within the title or abstract; no limitations on publication date or format were applied; conference abstracts were excluded. We used qualitative, discourse analysis to identify key themes and generate an operational definition and conceptual model of GOC.

RESULTS

A total of 214 texts were included in the final analysis. Use of GOC increased over time with 87% of included texts published in the last decade (2009-2018). An operational definition emerged from consensus within the published literature: the overarching aims of medical care for a patient that are informed by patients' underlying values and priorities, established within the existing clinical context, and used to guide decisions about the use of or limitation(s) on specific medical interventions. Application of the GOC concept was described as important to the care of patients with serious illness, in order to (1) promote patient autonomy and patient-centered care, (2) avoid unwanted care and identify valued care, and (3) provide psychological and emotional support for patients and their families.

DISCUSSION

The use of the phrase "goals of care" within the healthcare literature is increasingly common. We identified a consensus, operational definition that can facilitate communication about serious illness among patients, families, and clinicians and provide a framework for researchers developing interventions to improve goal-concordant care.

Development of an International Standard Set of Value-Based Outcome Measures for Patients With Chronic Kidney Disease: A Report of the International Consortium for Health Outcomes Measurement (ICHOM) CKD Working Group

Value-based health care is increasingly promoted as a strategy for improving care quality by benchmarking outcomes that matter to patients relative to the cost of obtaining those outcomes. To support the shift toward value-based health care in chronic kidney disease (CKD), the International Consortium for Health Outcomes Measurement (ICHOM) assembled an international working group of health professionals and patient representatives to develop a standardized minimum set of patient-centered outcomes targeted for clinical use. The considered outcomes and patient-reported outcome measures were generated from systematic literature reviews. Feedback was sought from patients and health professionals. Patients with very high-risk CKD (stages G3a/A3 and G3b/A2-G5, including dialysis, kidney transplantation, and conservative care) were selected as the target population. Using an online modified Delphi process, outcomes important to all patients were selected, such as survival and hospitalization, and to treatment-specific subgroups, such as vascular access survival and kidney allograft survival. Patient-reported outcome measures were included to capture domains of health-related quality of life, which were rated as the most important outcomes by patients. Demographic and clinical variables were identified to be used as case-mix adjusters. Use of these consensus recommendations could enable institutions to monitor, compare, and improve the quality of their CKD care.