Cards as Prompts in Adaptive Serious Illness Conversations

Abstract:

Serious illness conversations (SICs) are structured caregiver-patient conversations focusing on the wishes and hopes of the patient. The aim is to support shared decision-making, especially in the area of palliative care and advanced care directives. A major challenge in SICs is to avoid caregiver presumptions in influencing the preferences of the patient, since they may not have thought about the subject prior to the conversation and may need some guidance to reflect. This is especially true in patient groups where symptoms, life expectancy and outcome vary significantly, and which often receive aggressive end-of-life treatments, such as in the case of haematological malignancies. In this pilot study of SICs we used cards representing things that are potentially important for quality of life as props for patients to visualise and reason about priorities, hopes and fears in the context of their illness and treatment. We report some preliminary results and outline an experimental study to evaluate and develop card assisted SICs.

Research areas:

• Dialogue
• Reasoning

Year:

2026

Type of Publication:

In Proceedings

Book title:

Proceedings of the 30th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue - Poster Abstracts