The COMFORT Model
The COMFORT Model optimizes communication between nurses, patients, and families, and coworkers—especially during critical care transitions and points of decision-making. Offered as a teachable curriculum of seven modules, advances communication attitude, knowledge, and skill. The model empowers nurses with evidence-based communication practices proven to improve self-efficacy, confidence, and comfort in complex healthcare conversations.
What is the Comfort Model?
This module presents the communication process to understand the patient’s story and to recognize task and relationship practices.
CONNECT
R
C
OPTIONS
This module teaches about health-literacy, and how to understand and respect a patient’s/family’s cultural orientation.
MAKING MEANING
Families have their own communication patterns. This module teaches how to observe communication patterns within the family and in particular, recognize the caregiver’s communication pattern.
This module shows how to engage in active listening and understand nonverbal communication.
FAMILY CAREGIVER
There are key points in patient/family care where we are given the opportunity to begin important conversations and to find common ground. This module teaches out to look for those openings.
OPENINGS
This module speaks to the fact that patients/families may have multiple goals and that these need to be taken into consideration. It also instructs us how to link care to the quality-of-life domains.
RELATING
M
F
T
O
TEAM
O
This module illustrates how to develop team processes, cultivate team structures and distinguish successful collaboration from group cohesion.
COMFORT Training Program
We are excited to introduce you to the COMFORT Communication training program – a revolutionary program designed to equip care teams with essential tools for effectively communicating with patients, families, and colleagues about goals of care.
National organizations recognize goal-concordant care as the gold standard for those with serious illnesses. Effective communication among healthcare providers is essential for achieving excellence in this field. Integration of COMFORT training is vital to improving patient satisfaction, including HCAHPS patient experience scores.
This validated, effective training program is a blended solution combining online modules with synchronous or asynchronous engagement sessions designed to facilitate workplace learning. Healthcare providers learn new skills, practice them, and plan to implement them in their unique work settings. After completing the training, they are equipped with communication tools and pathways for engagement, addressing the whole patient and family, and cultivating a goal-concordant environment in which goals of care become integrated and normative across interactions.
• Improved patient satisfaction scores
• Enhanced staff ability to navigate moral distress
• Proven staff satisfaction and ease with training
• Strengthened teamwork and care coordination
• Increased staff career readiness and performance
Contact us today to learn how your organization can benefit from COMFORT Communication training and revolutionize the way your healthcare providers communicate about goals of care.
Additional Resources
COMFORT Communication App
This is a smartphone application (app). As an mHealth translation of the COMFORT curriculum, it is designed to provide supportive communication tools for healthcare providers encountering communication challenges with patients, families, and team members. Written at a sixth-grade level, it offers practice suggestions to support healthcare providers. When tested, participants found it easy to use and navigate, indicating they would use the app with patients, families and other team members. A revised version now includes COVID-19 communication resources for providers.
Plain Language Planner
This tool breaks down into plain language (both Spanish and English) common medications and treatments that cancer patients receive. It describes side effects that patients may experience in easy-to-understand words and gives, also in plain language, practical suggestions on how to prepare for treatment. In short, it removes the mystery from the long and complicated terms patients may hear in the course of their cancer journey. The COMFORT Plain Language Planner is available in hard copy and as part of the COMFORT Health Communication App. This application was tested on a group of 155 health care professionals and a comparison between written responses before and after the education sessions showed improvement in the use of plain language.