Physician Self-assessment of Shared Decision-making in Simulated Intensive Care Unit Family Meetings.

Importance: Professional guidelines have identified key communication skills for shared decision-making for critically ill patients, but it is unclear how intensivists interpret and implement them.

Objective: To compare the self-evaluations of intensivists reviewing transcripts of their own simulated intensive care unit family meetings with the evaluations of trained expert colleagues.

Design, Setting, And Participants: A posttrial web-based survey of intensivists was conducted between January and March 2019.

Family-Centered Care During the COVID-19 Era.

Family support is more, not less, important during crisis. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, maintaining public safety necessitates restricting the physical presence of families for hospitalized patients. In response, health systems must rapidly adapt family-centric procedures and tools to circumvent restrictions on physical presence.

Effect of Intensivist Communication in a Simulated Setting on Interpretation of Prognosis Among Family Members of Patients at High Risk of Intensive Care Unit Admission: A Randomized Trial.

Importance: Discordance about prognosis between a patient's health care decision-making surrogate and the treating intensivist is common in the intensive care unit (ICU). Empowering families, friends, and caregivers of patients who are critically ill to make informed decisions about care is important, but it is unclear how best to communicate prognostic information to surrogates when a patient is expected to die.

Objective: To determine whether family members, who are often health care decision-making surrogates, interpret intensivists as being more optimistic when questions about prognosis in the ICU are answered indirectly.

Low-pressure cardiac tamponade masquerading as severe sepsis diagnosed with a bedside ultrasound and as the initial presentation of malignancy.

Objective: We report a patient with low-pressure cardiac tamponade masquerading as sepsis and as the initial presentation of malignancy. A quick diagnosis was done by the intensivist performing a bedside ultrasound.

Background: The diagnosis of low-pressure cardiac tamponade is a challenge because the classic physical signs of cardiac tamponade can be absent.

Bilateral symmetrical cortical osteolytic lesions in two patients with Gaucher disease.

Gaucher disease (GD) is an autosomal recessive lysosomal storage disorder characterized by the reduced or absent activity of glucocerebrosidase. The disease is split into three types. Type 3, or chronic neuronopathic GD, manifests with heterogeneous clinical presentations.