Clinician Self-Disclosure in Palliative Care: Describing a Taxonomy and Proposing a Communication Tool.

While patient self-disclosure is expected and necessary in the clinical setting, clinicians generally minimize their own self-disclosure, a practice largely guided by the boundaries of the fiduciary relationship. At the same time, many clinicians can recall a time when they made a self-disclosure to a patient, and it seemed to benefit the treatment relationship, if not the treatment itself. We reviewed literature from a variety of fields describing opinions, theories and limited data about the effects of clinician self-disclosure.

The Therapeutic Utility of the Pregnant Palliative Care Physician: A Case Series.

Women physicians are becoming more numerous, with the majority of active hospice and palliative medicine physicians under the age of 50 being women. While this trend has appropriately led to discussions of supporting, recruiting, and retaining women physicians, there is little literature about the effect of women physicians on patients. In particular, little has been written about the effect of a physician's pregnancy.

Four Communication Skills from Psychiatry Useful in Palliative Care and How to Teach Them.

Palliative care and psychiatry share a number of the same priorities, including careful attention to communication skill development. In this article, we identify 4 communication skills helpful in both fields: (1) attending to countertransference, (2) practicing active listening and active reflection, (3) remaining silent and neutral, and (4) naming the emotion. We then describe strategies for teaching these skills.

A survey of prognosis discussions held by health-care providers who request palliative care consultation.

Background: Patient misunderstandings about prognosis may be related to lack of communication.

Aim: This study aimed to examine prognosis discussions held with hospitalized patients for whom palliative care consultations were requested, and if prognosis discussions did not occur, to explore why not.

Design: This was a survey conducted over the telephone from a convenience sample of health-care providers who requested palliative care consultations.