Aging is not an Illness: Exploring Geriatricians' Resistance to Serious Illness Conversations

Serious illness conversations help clinicians align medical decisions with patients' goals, values, and priorities and are considered an essential component of shared decision-making. Yet geriatricians at our institution have expressed reluctance about the serious illness care program.

We sought to explore geriatricians' perspectives on serious illness conversations.

We conducted focus groups with interprofessional stakeholders in geriatrics.

Three key themes emerged that help explain the reluctance of clinicians caring for older patients to have or document serious illness conversations: 1) aging in itself is not a serious illness; 2) geriatricians often focus on positive adaptation and social determinants of health and in this context, the label of "serious illness conversations" is perceived as limiting; and 3) because aging is not synonymous with illness, important goals-of-care conversations are not necessarily documented as serious illness conversations until an acute illness presents itself.

As institutions work to create system-wide processes for documenting conversations about patients' goals and values, the unique communication preferences of older patients and geriatricians should be specifically considered.