Loughborough University
Browse

Engaging terminally ill patients in end of life talk: how experienced palliative medicine doctors navigate the dilemma of promoting discussions about dying

Download (513.71 kB)
journal contribution
posted on 2016-06-10, 14:49 authored by Marco PinoMarco Pino, Ruth Parry, Victoria LandVictoria Land, Christina Faull, Luke Feathers, Jane Seymour
Objective To examine how palliative medicine doctors engage patients in end-of-life (hereon, EoL) talk. To examine whether the practice of “eliciting and responding to cues”, which has been widely advocated in the EoL care literature, promotes EoL talk. Design Conversation analysis of video- and audio-recorded consultations. Participants Unselected terminally ill patients and their companions in consultation with experienced palliative medicine doctors. Setting Outpatient clinic, day therapy clinic, and inpatient unit of a single English hospice. Results Doctors most commonly promoted EoL talk through open elaboration solicitations; these created opportunities for patients to introduce–then later further articulate–EoL considerations in such a way that doctors did not overtly ask about EoL matters. Importantly, the wording of elaboration solicitations avoided assuming that patients had EoL concerns. If a patient responded to open elaboration solicitations without introducing EoL considerations, doctors sometimes pursued EoL talk by switching to a less participatory and more presumptive type of solicitation, which suggested the patient might have EoL concerns. These more overt solicitations were used only later in consultations, which indicates that doctors give precedence to patients volunteering EoL considerations, and offer them opportunities to take the lead in initiating EoL talk. There is evidence that doctors treat elaboration of patients’ talk as a resource for engaging them in EoL conversations. However, there are limitations associated with labelling that talk as “cues” as is common in EoL communication contexts. We examine these limitations and propose “possible EoL considerations” as a descriptively more accurate term. Conclusions Through communicating–via open elaboration solicitations–in ways that create opportunities for patients to volunteer EoL considerations, doctors navigate a core dilemma in promoting EoL talk: giving patients opportunities to choose whether to engage in conversations about EoL whilst being sensitive to their communication needs, preferences and state of readiness for such dialogue.

Funding

This research was funded by The Health Foundation via an Insight grant RU33.

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies

Published in

PLoS One

Volume

11

Issue

5

Citation

PINO, M. ... et al, 2016. Engaging terminally ill patients in end of life talk: how experienced palliative medicine doctors navigate the dilemma of promoting discussions about dying. PLoS One, 11 (5), e0156174

Publisher

Public Library of Science / © The Authors

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/

Acceptance date

2016-05-17

Publication date

2016

Notes

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

ISSN

1932-6203

Language

  • en