Goals-of-care conversations are filled with emotion. Clinicians can often feel at a road block when they encounter highly emotional conversations. Patients and families may not be able to process medical information or make decisions when they are overwhelmed by emotion. Our presence, support and empathy are powerful sources of strength and comfort. By responding to emotions, we build trust and can move to a place of decision making. During this session, Dr. Aragon will provide a framework for using empathy in a goals-of-care conversation. We will review how to respond to emotion and present examples of how empathic statements can move a goals-of-care conversation forward. Finally, we will discuss scenarios when empathic statements may not facilitate a conversation as expected.

During this webinar, Dr. Aragon reviews the role of empathy when discussing goals of care, explores the use of empathic statements to help facilitate transitions in care and discusses how to modulate our responses when empathic statements are not moving a conversation forward.