Collaborative Communication in Pediatric Palliative Care: A Foundation for Problem-Solving and Decision-Making

In an ideal world, all of us—patients, parents, family members, nurses, physicians, social workers, therapists, pastoral care workers, and others—would always work together in a collaborative manner to provide the best care possible. This article bases the framework for this ideal upon studies of communication between patients, families, and clinicians, as well as more general works on communication, collaboration, decision-making, mediation, and ethics, and is comprised of four parts: what is meant by collaborative communication; key concepts that influence how we frame the situations that children with life-threatening conditions confront and how these frameworks shape the care we provide; general topics that are important to the task of collaborative communication, specifically how we use heuristics when we set about to solve complicated problems; and three common tasks of collaborative communication, offering practical advice for patient care.