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.