Unpacking Communication About End-of-Life Care: Resulting Recommendations

Communication is a good thing—critiques of Twitter and other forms of social media notwithstanding. In health care, high-quality physician-patient communication benefits patients' emotional health, symptoms, function, physiology, and pain.1 In nursing homes, staff who communicate more effectively with residents with dementia witness less resistance to care2 and reduced need for antipsychotic medications.3 Other examples of the benefits of communication in nursing homes include decreased falls4 and improved patient safety when using structured communication protocols such as SBAR (situation, background, assessment, recommendation).