Clinician-to-Clinician Communication of Patient Goals of Care Within a Surgical Intensive Care Unit

Abstract

BackgroundLittle is known about the process by which inpatient teams document and convey goals of care (GOC) for critically ill surgical patients. We sought to explore clinician perspectives on the barriers and facilitators to clinician-to-clinician communication and delivery of goal-concordant patient care. MethodsPurposive and snowball sampling were used to recruit a multidisciplinary sample of clinicians who held roles in a surgical intensive care unit at a single tertiary care facility. Semistructured interviews with clinicians were conducted between September and December 2017 to assess clinician experiences with communicating and honoring patient GOC. Two independent coders performed qualitative coding in an iterative fashion using a framework approach. Inter-rater agreement was measured by kappa coefficient. ResultsThirty-three clinicians from multiple disciplines including surgery, anesthesiology, nursing, and social work, were interviewed. Analysis revealed that clinicians in all disciplines felt responsible for honoring patient GOC. Conflicts over patient GOC and how to honor them arose between clinicians with longitudinal patient relationships (preoperative and postoperative) and those with single-phase relationships (postoperative). Barriers to clinician-to-clinician communication and delivery of goal-concordant care included inaccessible records, lack of protocols, and difficulty in documenting complex conversations. Facilitators included recognition of a patient's unique treatment priorities and family members with a unified understanding of a patient's GOC. ConclusionsDifferences in the clinician-patient relationships and difficulty accessing information about patient preferences contribute to clinician conflicts and concerns with the goal concordance of patient care.