The Team-Based Serious Illness Care Program, A Qualitative Evaluation of Implementation and Teaming.

Context: Earlier and more frequent serious illness conversations with patients allow clinical teams to better align care with patients' goals and values. Nonphysician clinicians often have unique perspectives and understanding of patients' wishes and are thus well-positioned to support conversations with seriously ill patients. The Team-based Serious Illness Care Program (SICP) at Stanford aimed to involve all care team members to support and conduct serious illness conversations with patients and their caregivers and families.

Objectives: We conducted interviews with clinicians to understand how care teams implement team-based approaches to conduct serious illness conversations and navigate resulting team complexity.

Methods: We used a rapid qualitative approach to analyze semistructured interviews of clinicians and administrative stakeholders in two team-based SICP implementation groups (i.e., inpatient oncology and hospital medicine) (n = 25). Analysis was informed by frameworks/theory: cross-disciplinary role agreement, team formation and functioning, and organizational theory.

Results: Implementing team-based SICP was feasible. Theme 1 centered on how teams formed and managed to come to an agreement: teams with rapidly changing staffing/responsibilities prioritized communication, whereas teams with consistent staffing/responsibilities primarily relied on protocols. Theme 2 demonstrated that leaders and managers at multiple levels could support implementation. Theme 3 explored strengths and opportunities. Positively, team-based SICP distributed work burden, timed conversations in alignment with patient needs, and added unique value from nonphysician team members. Role ambiguity and conflict were attributed to miscommunication and ethical conflicts.

Conclusion: Team-based serious illness communication is viable and valuable, with a range of successful workflow and leadership approaches.