Script Guides: COVID-19 Goals of Care Scripts for Nursing Home, Outpatient, and Hospital Settings
Script Guides: COVID-19 Goals of Care Scripts for Nursing Home, Outpatient, and Hospital Settings
The Yale Geriatrics and Palliative Care faculty and fellows have adapted brief script guides for the difficult conversations many clinicians are having with patients and families during the COVID pandemic.
These tools were in response to needs across settings from home care to nursing homes to ICUs. They were adapted for scenarios where proactive goals of care discussions are urgently needed. The document set contains scripts for four likely COVID situations that can be adapted to discussions with patients or their families:
- nursing home residents without COVID + status (facility may have COVID positivity);
- outpatient with COVID + status;
- stable hospitalized patient with or without COVID;
- hospitalized, less stable COVID + patient in the face of crisis status or limited resources.
In addition, a 5th script guides clinicians through helping families remotely say goodbye to dying patients if they are unable to visit.
The scripts serve as flexible resources to pick and choose phrases that can be adapted for a variety of conversations. Locally, these scripts are being distributed with 3 additional documents from VitalTalk (NURSE) and the Academy for Communication in Healthcare (Ask Respond Tell) highlighting patient-centered communication and empathic response pearls, both critical to optimize this communication.
These scripts are based on, and adapted from, the helpful tools created by VitalTalk® (e.g. COVID Ready Communication Playbook), Respecting Choices®, PREPARE for your careTM, and the Center to Advance Palliative Care (CAPC).
To download the scripts, click here.
