Introduction
Relationship-centered care is defined as an approach that prioritizes both biomedical and psychosocial aspects of the therapeutic relationship between a provider and patient/family. The key dimensions of relationship-centered care are provider self-awareness/self-growth, the patient’s/family’s experience of health and illness, and the development and maintenance of relationships through effective relationship-centered communication (RCC).1 RCC focuses on empathy, reflective listening, patient/family perspectives, and patient/family understanding of information.1,2 A provider’s communication approach is a powerful and invaluable skill that can affect both patient/family satisfaction3 and patient healthcare outcomes.4 Specific to pediatric medicine, effective communication must take place within the patient-parent-provider triad and relies on a foundation of informativeness, interpersonal sensitivity, and partnership building.5,6 Furthermore, within pediatric hematology/oncology, the provider’s communication approach has the ability to significantly impact complex information sharing and decision-making between the patient/family and provider.7–12
In 2007, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) identified 6 core functions of communication in the care of adult patients with cancer:fostering healing relationships, exchanging information, responding to emotions, managing uncertainty, making decisions, andenabling patient/family self-management .13These communication functions have also been validated in pediatrics, with the discovery of additional functions of providing validation and supporting hope that have explicit importance within pediatrics.14 There has been some descriptive research regarding communication within pediatric oncology, but there is a need for interventional studies regarding the NCI core communication functions within pediatric hematology/oncology.8 In this study, we aim to evaluate the impact of an RCC skills training intervention for pediatric hematology/oncology providers on patient/family experience. Our group has previously demonstrated the ability of this intervention to improve pediatric emergency provider communication as perceived by patients/families and improve provider self-efficacy in pediatric-specific communication skills for multidisciplinary pediatric providers,15,16 and thus we aimed to determine whether these improvements also translated into an enhanced patient/family experience.