Intensive care medicine
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Intensive care medicine · Jul 2022
How doctors manage conflicts with families of critically ill patients during conversations about end-of-life decisions in neonatal, pediatric, and adult intensive care.
Intensive care is a stressful environment in which team-family conflicts commonly occur. If managed poorly, conflicts can have negative effects on all parties involved. Previous studies mainly investigated these conflicts and their management in a retrospective way. This study aimed to prospectively explore team-family conflicts, including its main topics, complicating factors, doctors' conflict management strategies and the effect of these strategies. ⋯ This study underlines the importance of doctors tailoring their communication strategies to the concrete conflict topic(s) and to the context- and family-related factors which complicate a specific conflict.