2025/09/18 by Doyin Adeyemi, Cranley, Lisa, Gray, Carolyn Steele +7
Nursing · #Communication tools #Compassionate care #Digital health #FOS: Health sciences #Geriatric Nursing #Long-term care #Medicine and Health Sciences #Nursing #Scoping review
paper · doi:10.17605/osf.io/a75us
The long-term care (LTC) system is under considerable pressure due to the combined effects of population aging (World Bank Open Data, 2025), the rising prevalence of dementia (World Health Organization, 2021), and the ongoing impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Ensuring the delivery of safe and high-quality healthcare is essential, and effective communication plays a critical role in achieving this (Sharkiya et al., 2023). Research consistently highlights that communication breakdowns between healthcare providers and residents (McGilton et al., 2017; Savundranayagam, 2014), as well as with family caregivers (Bennett et al., 2021; Falzarano, et al., 2022; Williams & Cadick, 2018), have a significant impact on the quality of care in LTC settings. The COVID-19 pandemic intensified long-standing communication challenges in LTC homes, largely due to visitor restrictions that significantly disrupted connections between residents, families, and healthcare providers (Hawes et al., 2025; McClean et al., 2024; Veiga-Seijo et al., 2022). Traditionally, research has emphasized the implementation of tools to enhance team communication (Boscart et al., 2017; Renz et al., 2013) and explored how communication skills training can help healthcare providers improve communication with families (Eggenberger et al., 2013) and residents in LTC (Machiels et al., 2017; Nguyen et al., 2019). More recently, there has been an increasing shift towards leveraging digital health technologies—such as tablets, websites, and mobile applications—to enhance communication in LTC settings. Digital communication tools such as mobile apps could improve the quality of healthcare provider-resident communication (Ansaldo et al., 2024; Wilson et al., 2022) and strengthen family caregiver communication with healthcare providers (Perez et al.,2022; Ruggiano et al., 2018). Studies have examined how information and communication technologies (e.g., reminders) can aid older adults with dementia in daily living activities (Ansaldo et al., 2024; D’Onofrio et al., 2017; Hird et al., 2024; Koo & Vizer, 2019). However, there remains a limited understanding of the communication tools that support LTC residents and their families to actively participate with healthcare providers during care planning (Cranley et al., 2022). The potential of digital health technologies to enhance compassionate care delivery is also gaining recent attention (Ali et al., 2022; RNAO, 2020; Hodges et al. 2020; Kemp et al., 2020). We adopt a commonly used multi-dimensional definition of compassion cited by others (Wiljer et al., 2019): 1) having awareness of suffering or need in another individual; (2) feeling moved [by another individual’s suffering or need]; (3) recognizing this feeling as a response to another’s suffering or need; (4) making a judgement that another is suffering; and (5) engaging in a behavior in an attempt to alleviate the suffering (Seppälä et al., 2017). Compassionate care is a key component of high-quality, inclusive, person- and family-centered care. Person-centered care is a holistic, collaborative and partnered approach to care (e.g., shared decision-making, care planning) that is tailored (personalized) to the individual and emphasizes personhood, respecting an individual’s rights as a person, building mutual trust and understanding, and developing therapeutic relationships (Harding et al. 2015; McCance & McCormack, 2025). Indeed, the intersection of digital technology and compassion is an emerging area of interest that holds potential for developing new approaches to delivering compassionate care (Kemp et al., 2020). However, the nature and scope of the evidence on digital communication tools to support LTC resident and family communication with healthcare providers for compassionate care remains unclear. The purpose of this scoping review is to identify and describe digital communication tools that support resident and family communication with healthcare providers for collaborative care planning in LTC, and with a focus on enhancing person- and family-centered compassionate care (RNAO, 2020). The findings could inform the development of digital communication tools that promote the delivery of compassionate care in LTC settings.