499: Differences in Communication Between Clinicians and Surrogates in Neurocritical Care Family Meetings

Key Points

• The aim is to analyze clinician-surrogate dialogue in family meetings to understand its effects on decision-making in neurocritical care.
• Analyzed de-identified transcripts from audio-recorded family meetings.
• Used NVivo to code 10 transcripts for communication structure and content.
• Five transcripts were double-coded for reliability, achieving kappa of 0.88.
• Classified statements into categories like neurodiagnostics and patient values.
• Performed frequency and chi-square analyses to identify significant differences.
• 30% of statements were on neurodiagnostics, 24% on prognostication, and 16% on patient preferences.
• Clinicians made more neurodiagnostic (34% vs 20%) and prognostic statements (28% vs 17%; both p< 0.01).
• Families contributed more about patient preferences and values (23% vs 12%; p< 0.01).