Communication Skills Training for Nurses and Social Workers: An Initiative to Promote Interdisciplinary Advance Care Planning and Palliative Care in Patients on Dialysis.

Palliative care initiatives are needed in nephrology, yet implementation is lacking. We created a 6-hour workshop to teach the skills of active listening, responding to emotion, and exploring goals and values to nurses and social workers working in dialysis units. The workshop consisted of interactive didactics and structured role play with trained simulated patients. We assessed preparedness using a Likert scale and utilized paired t tests to measure the impact using a self-assessment survey following the training. Ten nurses and two social workers from six dialysis units completed the training. Mean scores improved in all domains: demonstrating empathic behaviors, responding to emotion and end-of-life concerns, eliciting family's concerns at end-of-life and patient's goals, and discussing spiritual concerns. Further testing in larger samples may help to confirm these results.