Closing the Gap: Foster Parents' Lived Experiences and Recommendations for Interdisciplinary Health-Care Providers.

This study explored barriers and facilitators to utilizing health-care services for foster youth, from the perspective of foster parents. There are nearly 437,283 youths in the United States foster care system. Youths living in locations that are different from their familial home situations have a significantly higher occurrence of physical and mental health illnesses than children who remain in their familial homes, increasing risk for homelessness, substance use and abuse, chronic long-term illnesses, and incarceration, thus placing additional burden on the health-care system.

Pediatric Goals of Care Communication: A Socioecological Model to Guide Conversations.

The purpose of this article is to explore factors that influence pediatric patients and their parents during provider-led goals-of-care conversations. Our framework can help providers enhance holistic communication by approaching difficult topics (ie, quality of life, end of life) with an understanding of the multilayered external influences that affect patient/parent decision making. A 5-layer model is presented that describes facilitators to conversations about quality goals of care and advance directives.

Role-play simulation to teach nursing students how to provide culturally sensitive care to transgender patients.

Objective: Increase student knowledge and comfort with caring for a transgender individual and confronting colleagues when exhibiting poor cultural intelligence.

Background: Transgender patients often experience health care inequities, including heteronormative microaggressions in communication and policies. Simulation has been a successful means of providing students with the education, tools, and experience necessary to combat systemic injustice in health care.

Communication and Cultural Sensitivity for Families and Children With Life-Limiting Diseases: An Informed Decision-Making Ethical Case in Community-Based Palliative Care.

The health care decisions of families of children who have life-limiting genetic diseases are impacted by multiple factors including religious and ethical values, education and knowledge, emotional trauma, availability of support, and accessibility of care. Palliative care nurses must practice the highest standards by delivering nonbiased, nonjudgmental support to patients and families; however, nurses may experience moral distress if their personal values conflict with a family's decisions and needs. This case focuses on a family receiving community-based palliative care for a child with a genetic life-limiting disease.