IMPORTANCE Seriously ill hospitalized patients have identified communication and decision making about goals of care as high priorities for quality improvement in end-of-life care. Interventions to improve care are more likely to succeed if tailored to existing barriers.OBJECTIVE To determine, from the perspective of hospital-based clinicians, (1) barriers impeding communication and decision making about goals of care with seriously ill hospitalized patients and their families and (2) their own willingness and the acceptability for other clinicians to engage in this process. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTSMulticenter survey of medical teaching units of nurses, internal medicine residents, and staff physicians from participating units at 13 university-based hospitals from 5 Canadian provinces. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURESImportance of 21 barriers to goals of care discussions rated on a 7-point scale (1 = extremely unimportant; 7 = extremely important). RESULTS Between September 2012 and March 2013, questionnaires were returned by 1256 of 1617 eligible clinicians, for an overall response rate of 77.7% (512 of 646 nurses [79.3%], 484 of 634 residents [76.3%], 260 of 337 staff physicians [77.2%]). The following family member-related and patient-related factors were consistently identified by all 3 clinician groups as the most important barriers to goals of care discussions: family members' or patients' difficulty accepting a poor prognosis (mean [SD] score, 5.8 [1.2] and 5.6 [1.3], respectively), family members' or patients' difficulty understanding the limitations and complications of life-sustaining treatments (5.8 [1.2] for both groups), disagreement among family members about goals of care (5.8 [1.2]), and patients' incapacity to make goals of care decisions (5.6 [1.2]). Clinicians perceived their own skills and system factors as less important barriers. Participants viewed it as acceptable for all clinician groups to engage in goals of care discussions-including a role for advance practice nurses, nurses, and social workers to initiate goals of care discussions and be a decision coach.CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE Hospital-based clinicians perceive family member-related and patient-related factors as the most important barriers to goals of care discussions. All health care professionals were viewed as playing important roles in addressing goals of care. These findings can inform the design of future interventions to improve communication and decision making about goals of care.
A cholesteric liquid crystal can be considered as a one-dimensional photonic crystal with a refractive index that is regularly modulated along the helix axis because of the particular arrangement of the molecules. The result is that the propagation of light is suppressed for a particular range of wavelengths (bandgap). A polymer-stabilized cholesteric liquid crystal (PSCLC), which is obtained by in situ photopolymerization of reactive liquid-crystal molecules in the presence of non-reactive liquid-crystal molecules in an oriented Bragg planar texture, is elaborated by combining the UV-curing with a thermally induced pitch variation. As a consequence, it is shown here that memory effects are introduced into the characteristics of the reflection band of the material at room temperature. In the visible spectrum, the reflection bandwidth can be tuned in agreement with the thermal ramp and broadened. In addition, the bandgap filters can be switched between broadband reflective, scattering and transparent states by subjecting them to an electric field. Related application fields of these functional materials are switchable smart windows for the control of the solar-light spectrum and white-or-black polarizer-free reflective displays.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.