Delivering Bad News to Patients and Family Members Training

Sharing Serious News

Delivering bad news to a patient and/or family is one of the hardest things you do as a clinician working in palliative care. Research shows your personal communication skills can have a profound impact on patient decision-making, satisfaction and even outcomes.

Sharing Serious News will equip you for those hard conversations with clear and effective strategies that improve communication, encourage empathy, and reduce stress for patients, families, and the palliative care team.

When done well, sharing distressing news can preserve and strengthen the clinician-patient relationship, foster collaboration, and promote healing and coping with illness, injury, or death. Done poorly, it can cause unnecessary suffering, not just for the patient but for providers who feel overwhelmed and defeated by the experience.

Join the Interest List!

This curriculum utilizes case studies, interactive exercises and other tools to show you how to better deliver difficult news. Whether it be a diagnosis of serious illness, treatment failure, transitions in care, or unexpected death, better communication skills support patients and families as they absorb life-changing information.

This course is ideal for:

• Physicians
• Physician assistants
• Nurse practitioners
• Any clinician working in primary care, acute care, long-term care, community-based palliative care or any other healthcare setting.

Skilled, empathic clinicians can help patients and families focus their energies on the healthcare challenges at hand. Palliative care clinicians trained to share serious news while attending to patients’ emotional responses are likely to have greater satisfaction in their work and decreased feelings of stress and burnout (Tulsky, 2014).

By the end of this two-hour course, learners will be able to:

• Utilize the six-step SPIKES model for sharing serious news
• Describe three elements of preparing the setting to share serious news
• Describe two opportunities for showing empathy
• Demonstrate two communication tools for sharing serious news with patients

Fast Facts

Begins:	Online courses are available immediately upon registration
Is taught:	Completely online, available 24/7
Offers:	2 Continuing Education Hours OR Click HERE for CME Credit Info*
Costs:	$149
Requires:	Computing skills sufficient to complete graduate work, access to a computer with an Internet connection, ability to upload photos
Is ideal for:	Physicians, physician assistants, nurses, social workers, or any member of the palliative care team
Detailed FAQ:	Click HERE.
Cancellation Policy:	There are no refunds on our self-paced courses

Course Information

CME Credits

The Doctors Company designates this activity for a maximum of 2 AMA PRA Category 2 Credit(s)™. Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity. 

This activity has been planned and implemented in accordance with the accreditation requirements and policies of the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) through the joint providership of The Doctors Company and California State University Shiley Institute for Palliative Care. The Doctors Company is accredited by the ACCME to provide continuing medical education for physicians. 

About the Authors:

Kathleen A. Bonvicini, MPH, EdD, is the Chief Executive Officer at the Institute for Healthcare Communication (IHC), a nonprofit organization based in New Haven, CT, that has been designing and implementing skill-based communication training to health professionals since 1989. Dr Bonvicini has conducted and published her research in empathic connection specific to clinician empathy, interviewing techniques, and other clinician-communication topics. Previous to her work with IHC, Dr Bonvicini has 15 years of psychiatric research experience at Yale University and has extensive experience in clinical interviewing with highly diverse populations. Dr Bonvicini has held faculty positions with the Department of Public Health at Southern Connecticut State University and with the Department of Psychology at Albertus Magnus College for twelve years.

Barbara Andrews, MPPM, MPH, has been the Director of Grants and Projects with the Institute for Healthcare Communication (IHC) since 2011. She brings extensive experience in grant seeking and management, health policy, business research, and program development and management. Before joining IHC, she served as a consultant to nonprofit health and aging services organizations, providing advice on grant strategy development, grant writing, grant program management and research. For more than 12 years she was a senior executive at the Connecticut Association of Not-for-profit Providers for the Aging (CANPFA, now LeadingAge Connecticut).

Course Information