<p><strong>CONTEXT: </strong>Interprofessional teams often develop a care plan prior to engaging in a family meeting in the pediatric cardiac intensive care unit (CICU)-a process that can affect the course of the family meeting and alter team dynamics, but that has not been studied.</p>

<p><strong>OBJECTIVES: </strong>To characterize the types of interactions that interprofessional team members have in pre-family meetings huddles in the pediatric CICU by 1) evaluating the amount of time each team member speaks; 2) assessing team communication and teamwork using standardized instruments; and 3) measuring team members' perceptions of collaboration and satisfaction with decision-making.</p>

<p><strong>METHODS: </strong>We conducted a prospective observational study in a pediatric CICU. Subjects were members of the interprofessional team attending preparation meetings prior to care meetings with families of patients admitted to the CICU for longer than two weeks. We quantitatively coded the amount each team member spoke. We assessed team performance of communication and teamwork using the PACT-Novice tool, and we measured perception of collaboration and satisfaction with decision-making using the CSACD questionnaire.</p>

<p><strong>RESULTS: </strong>Physicians spoke for an average of 83.9% of each meeting's duration (SD 7.5%); non-physicians averaged 9.9% (SD 5.2%). Teamwork behaviors were present and adequately performed as judged by trained observers. Significant differences in physician and non-physician perceptions of collaboration were found in 3 out of 10 observed meetings.</p>

<p><strong>CONCLUSIONS: </strong>Interprofessional team members' interactions in team meetings provide important information about team dynamics, revealing potential opportunities for improved collaboration and communication in team meetings and subsequent family meetings.</p>

<p><strong>BACKGROUND: </strong>Parents of children in the pediatric cardiac intensive care unit (CICU) report inadequate communication and a lack of empathy during conversations with their clinicians.</p>

<p><strong>OBJECTIVE: </strong>To assess quantitatively and qualitatively the contributions made by team members of different professions in communicating with parents during family meetings.</p>

<p><strong>DESIGN: </strong>Prospective observational study.</p>

<p><strong>SETTING/SUBJECTS: </strong>The pediatric CICU at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Subjects were members of the interprofessional team attending family meetings for patients admitted to the CICU longer than two weeks.</p>

<p><strong>MEASUREMENTS: </strong>We used quantitative conversation attribution and coding to compare durations of attendee contributions and contribution type by professional role. The SCOPE codebook and other quantitative codes drawn from best practices in family meetings were used to measure communication behaviors. A qualitative analysis of nurses' and social workers' contributions was used to identify themes not otherwise captured.</p>

<p><strong>RESULTS: </strong>Across 10 meetings, physicians spoke for an average of 78.1% (SD 10.7%) of each meeting, non-physicians 9.6% (SD 7.8%), and parents 17.4% (SD 12.2%). Parental understanding was assessed an average of 0.2 (SD 0.4) times per meeting. Parents expressed emotion an average of 4.2 times per meeting (SD 7.1) and the clinical team responded empathetically 2.2 times per meeting (SD 4.3). All clinician empathic responses were a minority of their overall contributions. Conversation was almost exclusively between physicians and families until physicians indicated other team members could contribute.</p>

<p><strong>CONCLUSIONS: </strong>Coordination of team members' roles in the meetings may improve parental engagement necessary for decision-making and empathic responses that are often missed.</p>

<p><strong>INTRODUCTION: </strong>Long-stay critically ill patients in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) may be at risk for inconsistencies in treatment plan, delay in plan progression, and patient/family dissatisfaction with communication. This article describes the development and evaluation of an intervention designed to improve continuity and communication delivered by continuity PICU attendings.</p>

<p><strong>METHODS AND ANALYSIS: </strong>A randomized controlled trial of an intervention in one PICU that was randomized at the patient level. Eligible patients and their parents included those admitted to the PICU for longer than one week and were anticipated to remain for an additional 7 days. The intervention, a Continuity Care Intensivist (CCI), included early assignment of a continuity attending (separate from a regularly scheduled service attending), standardization of the continuity role to ensure consistent team and family contact and facilitate timely decision making, and enhancement of CCI communication skills. The outcomes evaluated were 1) patient PICU length of stay, ventilator-dependent days, and hospital acquired infections, 2) parental mood and satisfaction with PICU communication, and 3) intensivist perception of acceptability of intervention. Intention to treat analysis will be completed using multivariable linear regression to determine the impact of the intervention on outcomes. Lessons have been learned about the appropriate enrollment criteria for patients to allow for impact of continuity attending, frequent prognostic uncertainty in determining which patients will become longer stay in the PICU, and the difficulty of achieving timely initial contact of continuity attending with patients given the CCI's other commitments.</p>

<p>Shared decision-making (SDM) is a process that brings together clinical expertise and families' values to arrive at a treatment choice. The process is especially useful for situations with &gt;1 reasonable option, a condition of equipoise. However, for pediatricians who want to adhere to SDM best practices, there is limited practical guidance regarding how to communicate with parents and patients. With the following text, we describe pragmatic strategies to support SDM around both high-stakes decisions in the acute setting as well as in the ongoing management of chronic conditions in settings such as primary care.</p>

<p><strong>BACKGROUND</strong>: Knowledge about how children die in pediatric hospitals is limited, and this hinders improvement in hospital-based end-of-life care.</p>

<p><strong>METHODS: </strong>We conducted a retrospective chart review of all the patients who died in a children's hospital between July 2011 and June 2014, collecting demographic and diagnostic information, hospital length of stay, location of death, and palliative care consultation. A qualitative review of provider notes and resuscitation records was used to create 5 mutually exclusive modes of death, which were then assigned to each patient. Analysis included the calculation of descriptive statistics and multinomial logistic regression modeling.</p>

<p><strong>RESULTS: </strong>We identified 579 patients who were deceased; 61% were &lt;1 year of age. The ICU was the most common location of death (NICU 29.7%; PICU 27.8%; cardiac ICU 16.6%). Among the 5 modes of death, the most common was the withdrawal of life-sustaining technology (40.2%), followed by nonescalation (25.6%), failed resuscitation (22.8%), code then withdrawal (6.0%), and death by neurologic criteria (5.3%). After adjustment, patients who received a palliative care consultation were less likely to experience a code death (odds ratio 0.31; 95% confidence interval 0.13-0.75), although African American patients were more likely than white patients to experience a code death (odds ratio 2.46; 95% confidence interval 1.05-5.73), mostly because of code events occurring in the first 24 hours of hospitalization.</p>

<p><strong>CONCLUSIONS: </strong>Most deaths in a children's hospital occur in ICUs after the withdrawal of life-sustaining technology. Race and palliative care involvement may influence the manner of a child's death.</p>

<p><strong>PURPOSE: </strong>Children with advanced cancer are often not referred to palliative or hospice care before they die or are only referred close to the child's death. The goals of the current project were to learn about pediatric oncology team members' perspectives on palliative care, to collaborate with team members to modify and tailor three separate interdisciplinary team-based interventions regarding initiating palliative care, and to assess the feasibility of this collaborative approach.</p>

<p><strong>METHODS: </strong>We used a modified version of experience-based codesign (EBCD) involving members of the pediatric palliative care team and three interdisciplinary pediatric oncology teams (Bone Marrow Transplant, Neuro-Oncology, and Solid Tumor) to review and tailor materials for three team-based interventions. Eleven pediatric oncology team members participated in four codesign sessions to discuss their experiences with initiating palliative care and to review the proposed intervention including patient case studies, techniques for managing uncertainty and negative emotions, role ambiguity, system-level barriers, and team communication and collaboration.</p>

<p><strong>RESULTS: </strong>The codesign process showed that the participants were strong supporters of palliative care, members of different teams had preferences for different materials that would be appropriate for their teams, and that while participants reported frustration with timing of palliative care, they had difficulty suggesting how to change current practices.</p>

<p><strong>CONCLUSIONS: </strong>The current project demonstrated the feasibility of collaborating with pediatric oncology clinicians to develop interventions about introducing palliative care. The procedures and results of this project will be posted online so that other institutions can use them as a model for developing similar interventions appropriate for their needs.</p>

<p><strong>CONTEXT: </strong>Pediatric palliative care consults for children with cancer often occur late in the course of disease and close to death, when earlier involvement would reduce suffering. The perceptions that pediatric oncology providers hold about the pediatric palliative care service (PPCS) may shape referral patterns.</p>

<p><strong>OBJECTIVE: </strong>To explore how pediatric oncology providers at one institution perceived the hospital's PPCS and the way these perceptions may influence the timing of consultation.</p>

<p><strong>METHODS: </strong>We conducted semi-structured qualitative interviews with pediatric oncology providers at a large children's hospital. Interviews were audio recorded, transcribed and analyzed by two coders using a modified grounded theory approach.</p>

<p><strong>RESULTS: </strong>We interviewed 16 providers (10 physicians, 1 nurse practitioner, 2 social workers, 2 psychologists and 1 child life specialist). Three core perceptions emerged: (1) the PPCS offers a diverse range of valuable contributions to the care of children with advancing cancer; (2) providers held favorable opinions about the PPCS due to positive interactions with individual palliative care specialists deemed extraordinarily emotionally skilled; and (3) there is considerable emotional labor involved in calling a PPCS consult that serves as a barrier to early initiation.</p>

<p><strong>CONCLUSION: </strong>The pediatric oncology providers in our study held a highly favorable opinion about their institution's PPCS and agreed that early consultation is ideal. However, they also described that formally consulting PPCS is extremely difficult because of what the PPCS symbolizes to families and the emotional labor that the provider must manage in introducing them. Interventions to encourage the early initiation of palliative care in this population may benefit from a focus on the emotional experiences of providers.</p>

<p><strong>CONTEXT: </strong>The families of oncology patients requiring intensive care often face increasing complexity in communication with their providers, particularly when patients are cared for by providers from different disciplines.</p>

<p><strong>OBJECTIVE: </strong>To describe experiences and challenges faced by pediatric oncologists and intensivists and how the oncologist-intensivist relationship impacts communication and initiation of goals of care discussions (GCDs).</p>

<p><strong>METHODS: </strong>We conducted semi-structured interviews with a convenience sample of ten physicians, including pediatric oncology and intensive care attendings and fellows.</p>

<p><strong>RESULTS: </strong>We identified key themes (3 barriers, 4 facilitators) to having GCDs with families of oncology patients who have received intensive care. Barriers included challenges to communication within teams because of hierarchy and between teams due to incomplete sharing of information and confusion about who should initiate GCDs; provider experiences of internal conflict about how to engage parents in decision making and about the "right thing to do" for patients; and lack of education and training in communication. Facilitators included team preparation for family meetings; skills for partnering with families; the presence of palliative care specialists; and informal education in communication and willingness for further training in communication. Notably, the education theme was identified as both a barrier and a resource.</p>

<p><strong>CONCLUSION: </strong>We identified barriers to communication with families both within and between teams and for individual physicians. Formal communication training and processes that standardize communication to ensure completeness and role delineation between clinical teams may improve oncologists' and intensivists' ability to initiate GCDs, thereby fulfilling their ethical obligations of decision support.</p>

<p>Social media, no stranger to health care environments, is increasingly used by patients, families, clinicians, and institutions to interact and engage in new ways. The ethical challenges related to the use of social media in the clinical setting are familiar, yet come with a novel twist, including the possibility of having a conflict "go viral". Health care clinicians and institutions must understand and embrace these technologies, while at the same time promoting policies and practices that ensure the ethically appropriate use of social media and address strategies for preventing and responding to a social media crisis.</p>