Assessing families in palliative care: a pilot study of the checklist of family relational abilities.

Although families often play an integral role in palliative care, there are currently few measures to help clinicians gauge families' abilities to participate in this process. The Checklist of Family Relational Abilities was developed as an efficient, clinician-rated method of family assessment. Preliminary results suggest that Checklist ratings of overall family functioning and strength of family attachments were reliable across raters and associated with a well-validated self-report measure of family functioning. However, ratings of family communication and collaborative decision-making were less reliable. Based on these preliminary findings, we propose a revised version of the Checklist for further study in palliative care settings.