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This episode features\\xa0Rebecca Anderson (Marie Curie Palliative Care Research Department, Division of Psychiatry, University College London,\\xa0London, UK).

Honest prognostic communication with families of patients in the final hours and days of life is important for enabling a good death and for families\\u2019\\xa0preparedness for that death.
Prognostic uncertainty makes this communication challenging for clinicians and families.

Clinicians provided what we term \\u2018absolute categorical time estimates\\u2019 (suggesting a prognosis of \\u2018hours\\u2019 or \\u2018days\\u2019) and explained how that prognosis\\xa0was reached, allowing them to reduce prognostic uncertainty without committing to an overly specific timescale.
When requesting prognostic information, relatives helped to relieve the burden of uncertainty for clinicians by alluding to their awareness that\\xa0prognostication is a subjective judgement.
Clinicians and relatives could be direct about prognosis without explicitly referring to \\u2018death\\u2019 and \\u2018dying\\u2019, as references to time were understood by both\\xa0parties as referring to prognosis.

This paper identified key practices for communicating prognosis with families of patients at the very end of life, such as explicitly stating the uncertainty\\xa0while invoking expertise, and using absolute categorical time estimates when providing a prognosis.
These practices could be taught as part of communication training using clips of recordings from real-life interactions.


Full paper available from:\\xa0\\xa0 \\xa0
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0269216320910934

If you would like to record a podcast about your published (or accepted) Palliative Medicine paper, please contact Dr\\xa0Amara Nwosu:\\xa0
a.nwosu@lancaster.ac.uk