A Comfort Measures Only Checklist for Critical Care Providers: Impact on Satisfaction and Symptom Management.

Purpose: This quality improvement project created a guide for critical care providers transitioning patients to comfort measures only encouraging communication, collaboration, and shared decision making; ensuring management of patients' end-of-life symptoms and needs; and enhancing provider satisfaction by improving structure and consistency when transitioning patients.

Description Of The Project: Interviews conducted with staff in intensive care units revealed opportunities to improve structure and processes of transitioning patients at the end of life. A subcommittee of experts designed a checklist to facilitate interdisciplinary conversations.

Improving Knowledge, Comfort, and Confidence of Nurses Providing End-of-Life Care in the Hospital Setting Through Use of the CARES Tools.

Although most individuals prefer to die at home, approximately 60% of Americans die in the hospital setting. Nurses are inadequately prepared to provide end-of-life (EOL) care because of cure-focused education. Friends and family of dying patients report poor quality of death largely as a result of inadequate communication from health care professionals about the dying process.

Effects of an intervention to improve communication about end-of-life care among African Americans with chronic kidney disease.

The prevalence of and mortality from chronic kidney disease (CKD) are high among African Americans. Interventions to improve knowledge of the likely illness course and the benefits and risks of life-sustaining treatment at the end-of-life are needed for African Americans with CKD and their surrogate decision makers. Nineteen African Americans with stage 5 CKD and their surrogates were randomized to either patient-centered advance care planning (PC-ACP) or usual care.