Pediatric Goals of Care Communication: A Socioecological Model to Guide Conversations.

The purpose of this article is to explore factors that influence pediatric patients and their parents during provider-led goals-of-care conversations. Our framework can help providers enhance holistic communication by approaching difficult topics (ie, quality of life, end of life) with an understanding of the multilayered external influences that affect patient/parent decision making. A 5-layer model is presented that describes facilitators to conversations about quality goals of care and advance directives. Each year, complex health conditions (a) affect approximately 500 000 children in the United States, 8600 of whom meet current palliative care criteria, and (b) account for over 7 million child deaths globally. Nurses can use knowledge of the unique values and culture of families with children who have complex health conditions to support them by providing high quality, ongoing goals-of-care conversations, especially if their access to pediatric palliative care is limited.

Role-play simulation to teach nursing students how to provide culturally sensitive care to transgender patients.

OBJECTIVE: Increase student knowledge and comfort with caring for a transgender individual and confronting colleagues when exhibiting poor cultural intelligence. BACKGROUND: Transgender patients often experience health care inequities, including heteronormative microaggressions in communication and policies. Simulation has been a successful means of providing students with the education, tools, and experience necessary to combat systemic injustice in health care. Simulation is an interactive pedagogy that allows nursing students to practice assessment, patient care, and difficult conversations in a controlled, risk-free environment. DESIGN/ METHODS: Prelicensure nursing students role-played a simulation created as an interactive learning strategy to promote culturally sensitive assessment of a transgender patient and their caregiver, including assessing for pronouns and providing patient-centered care. The simulation included preforming a difficult conversation between nurses to cultivate an environment of being an upstander. The simulation demonstrated holistic methods of assessing and supporting unique patient needs for the patient who is transgender. RESULTS: Nursing students reported they felt that their comfort with advocacy and ability to communicate with transgender patients, as well as with their families, and health care team members was enhanced after completing the simulation. CONCLUSION: Simulation has the ability to reduce discomfort and discrimination in health care for transgender patients by equipping students with culturally sensitive and inclusive communication tools and providing them with risk-free environment where they can learn to provide care for this vulnerable population in preparation for successful future encounters.