Integration of Personalized Narrative to Inform Improved Communication for Patients with Life-Limiting Illness

Abstract

Narrative intervention has proven to be an effective method of allowing informed decisions, considering patient comfort, improving treatment outcomes, and more. A narrative intervention approach entails prompting patients to share their histories and identities to allow healthcare professionals a more comprehensive view of the patient. This study implemented a person-centered treatment plan for patients afflicted with life-limiting illness. A more holistic view of the patient was integrated into their Electronic Health Record (EHR) to improve physician-patient communication and patient experience. Narrative intervention outcomes were quantified via three field surveys distributed to patients. Significant results of linear mixed models indicate improvement in intervention groups in two of the three themes evaluated: Feeling Cared for as a Person/Respected in your Beliefs, and General Communication with the Nurse/Feeling Heard and Understood. For Feeling Cared for as a Person/Respected in your Beliefs, intervention resulted in an improvement of 0.87635 while control showed a -0.72109 decline. For General Communication, intervention reflected an improvement of 0.41378 while control yielded a -0.09366 decrease. The control group experienced a greater improvement (-0.349865) than the intervention (-0.1271034) in Emotional Wellbeing. Personalized narrative intervention is indicated to be an efficient method of optimizing nurse to patient communication while taking a patient’s wants and needs into consideration. Narrative intervention is not shown to benefit the emotional wellbeing of patients. Future directions can examine its impact on more specific realms of patient satisfaction as well as the feasibility of the method.