Health communication

Parental advice giving serves as an important form of informational support for parents of children living with complex chronic conditions (CCCs). These messages can provide backchannel insights into social challenges, best practices, and may offer different forms of experiential wisdom garnered from their own parental caregiving experiences. Contributing to the naturalistic, health-context investigations of advice messages, we interviewed 35 parents who discussed their experiences with parenting their medically complex child.

Parents of children diagnosed with complex chronic conditions (CCCs) face many challenges with managing their child's health. As parents are tasked with competing demands and the constant changes required to provide the best care possible for their child, talk about contradictions regarding their dual, and oftentimes competing, roles and responsibilities as both parent and caregiver is likely to occur.

Objective: To compare the communication experiences and preferences of racial/ethnic minority and non-Hispanic white (NHW) families in the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU), including their interactions with bedside nurses.

Background: Advance care planning (ACP) enables persons to identify preferences for future treatment and care, and to discuss, record and review these preferences. However, the uptake of ACP among patients with chronic diseases is relatively low. Web-based ACP programs can support patients and their relatives in ACP. However, information needs of patients and their relatives for ACP are unknown. The aim of this study is to explore information needs of patients with chronic disease and their relatives for web-based ACP.

Background: Health communication (HC) is a vast research field focusing on changing health behaviours, and rapidly evolving technology is creating different ways and possibilities to reach target groups and audiences. In the context of home care, a deeper understanding of HC is lacking, specifically for older persons with care needs and their informal caregivers. The aim of this concept analysis is to identify and construct the meaning of HC from the perspective of older persons in need of care in the home environment and their informal caregivers.

Background and Objectives Decisions about long-term care and financing can be difficult to comprehend, consider, and communicate. In a previous needs assessment, families in rural areas requested a patient-facing website; however, questions arose about the acceptability of an online tool for older adults. This study engaged older adults and family caregivers in (a) designing and refining an interactive, tailored decision aid website, and (b) field testing its utility, feasibility, and acceptability.

Background: Little is known about patients who have caregiver proxies communicate with healthcare providers via portal secure messaging (SM).

Context: Family caregivers (FCGs) of hospice cancer patients face significant challenges related to pain management.

Family carers have a central role in the care and support of people with MND and face the challenges of the disease from diagnosis to progression and the multiple losses of MND, but their support needs are often neglected. This study aimed to investigate the experiences of family carers at the time of diagnosis and their satisfaction with receiving the news. An anonymous postal survey was facilitated by all MND Associations in Australia (2014) and 190 family carers completed the questionnaire. The questions centred on the SPIKES protocol for communicating bad news.

Background: Following criticism of the Liverpool Care of the Dying Pathway (LCP), widely used to guide care of dying people in British health-care settings, the UK Government set up an independent review which in 2013 recommended that use of the LCP be discontinued. In response, the Leadership Alliance for the Care of Dying People, a coalition of a wide range of stakeholders, recently published guidance entitled One Chance to Get it Right.