Physician Communication in Pediatric End-of-Life Care: A Simulation Study.

Objective: The objective of this exploratory study is to describe communication between physicians and the actor parent of a standardized 8-year-old patient in respiratory distress who was nearing the end of life.

Methods: Thirteen pediatric emergency medicine and pediatric critical care fellows and attendings participated in a high-fidelity simulation to assess physician communication with an actor-parent.

Results: Fifteen percent of the participants decided not to initiate life-sustaining technology (intubation), and 23% of participants offered alternatives to life-sustaining care, such as comfort measures.

A Qualitative Examination of Physician Gender and Parental Status in Pediatric End-of-Life Communication.

In this study we utilized the framework of patient-centered communication to explore the influence of physician gender and physician parental status on (1) physician-parent communication and (2) care of pediatric patients at the end of life (EOL). The findings presented here emerged from a larger qualitative study that explored physician narratives surrounding pediatric EOL communication. The current study includes 17 pediatric critical care and pediatric emergency medicine physician participants who completed narrative interviews between March and October 2012 to discuss how their backgrounds influenced their approaches to pediatric EOL communication.

Physician Religion and End-of-Life Pediatric Care: A Qualitative Examination of Physicians' Perspectives.

Physician religion/spirituality has the potential to influence the communication between physicians and parents of children at the end of life. In order to explore this relationship, the authors conducted two rounds of narrative interviews to examine pediatric physicians' perspectives (N=17) of how their religious/spiritual beliefs affect end-of-life communication and care. Grounded theory informed the design and analysis of the study.

Developing, integrating, and perpetuating new ways of applying sociology to health, medicine, policy, and everyday life.

As a framework for presenting ideas on developing ways to make sociology more applicable, we focus on the recent state of medical sociology research. Data for this paper were generated through a content analysis of a twelve-year period (1993-2004) of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior (JHSB) and Social Science & Medicine (SSM). The analysis aims to determine if the content of JHSB and SSM reflect the breadth of the sub-discipline of medical sociology as well as the stated goals of the journals.

A scale to assess attitudes toward euthanasia.

The topic of euthanasia has been a matter of public debate for several decades. Although empirical research should inform policy, scale measurement is lacking. After analyzing shortcomings of previous work, we offer a systematically designed scale to measure attitudes toward euthanasia.