Providing Culturally Sensitive Care for the Chinese Community and Beyond

Serious illness conversations can become particularly challenging when cultural values shape how illness, decision-making, and communication are approached. This Learning Institute session focuses on improving how clinicians provide palliative care for patients and families from Chinese cultural backgrounds, particularly during high-stakes conversations around prognosis and goals of care.

This session will outline an approach to common real-world challenges, including requests to pursue all possible treatments, hesitancy around direct discussions of prognosis, and family-centered decision-making. These situations are often perceived as barriers to care, but are reframed here as expressions of cultural values such as filial responsibility, protecting loved ones, and preserving family harmony.

It will equip clinicians with practical communication strategies that build trust, reduce conflict, and support shared decision-making. Participants will learn frameworks that prioritize emotional safety and alignment, and how cultural values, particularly filial piety, shape goals of care discussions, family roles, and expectations.

Participants will develop skills in using indirect communication strategies to approach sensitive or taboo topics such as prognosis and end-of-life care while maintaining trust and relational harmony. Through real clinical cases, participants will apply these approaches to common challenges, including communication breakdown, responses to perceived denial, and requests for interventions such as artificial hydration and nutrition at end of life. The workshop will also address how to navigate complex family dynamics with multiple stakeholders, and how to move conversations forward when they become stalled or conflicted.

This session is intended for physicians, nurses, and allied health professionals caring for patients with serious illness across acute care, primary care, oncology, and palliative care settings.

Participants will engage in case-based discussions and scenario exploration to examine how ethical frameworks, collaboration with interdisciplinary teams, and attention to caregiver sustainability can strengthen home-based end-of-life care. They will also explore how competency-based standards, cultural humility, and trauma-informed practices support safe, effective care and promote equitable, sustainable integration into diverse community settings.

By the end of this session, participants will be able to: 

• Describe how cultural values, including filial piety and family harmony, influence goals of care discussions and healthcare decision-making in Chinese patient populations.
• Demonstrate the use of indirect communication strategies to discuss sensitive topics such as prognosis and end-of-life care while maintaining trust and relational alignment.
• Apply structured communication frameworks to facilitate trust-building, support emotional safety, and guide shared decision-making in serious illness conversations.
• Analyze and manage common communication challenges, including perceived denial, requests for life-prolonging interventions, and complex family dynamics, using case-based approaches to achieve alignment and reduce conflict.

Providing Culturally Sensitive Care for the Chinese Community and Beyond
Tuesday, October 13th, from 1:00pm – 4:30pm (Eastern).

Dr. Kelvin Lou, M.D.

Dr. Kelvin Lou completed his Internal Medicine and Palliative Care training at UBC and now practices in British Columbia, Canada. He is passionate about communication in serious illness and end-of-life care, with a focus on how culture shapes understanding, decision-making, and relationships in healthcare.

He has a particular interest in the interplay between narrative and medicine, exploring how patients and families make sense of illness through stories, and how communication can support alignment, trust, and meaningful care during serious illness.