One voice at the bedside: aligning goals of care and prognostic communication in trauma and acute care surgery

High-acuity surgical and trauma care requires rapid decision-making under conditions of uncertainty, fragmented information flow, and competing physiological priorities. Patients frequently move across multiple services, each bringing distinct clinical expertise and discrete perspectives on prognosis, treatment goals, and acceptable outcomes. Within this dynamic environment, variation in prognostic framing and communication is common. Families often receive subtly different messages about the patient’s expected trajectory, which can foster confusion and mistrust. Clear, aligned communication is therefore not an adjunct to technical excellence; it is an essential component of high-quality trauma and surgical care.

Contemporary surgical practice increasingly intersects with palliative care principles. Surgical patients experience significant symptom burden, uncertain recovery, and frequent inflection points requiring reconsideration of goals of care. Surgeons occupy a central role in these early conversations. Early surgeon-initiated discussions about values and acceptable outcomes improve alignment between treatment plans and patient preferences, clarify expectations as clinical conditions evolve, and support family decision-making under stress. Yet, there is little formal training of surgeons in this area. Specialty palliative care is an essential partner when complexity, symptom burden, or decisional conflict exceed routine surgical management. Together, surgeon-led communication and selective palliative collaboration create a model in which trauma care remains both aggressive when appropriate and consistently grounded in what matters most to patients and families. This review, recently discussed at the American Association for the Surgery of Trauma online Grand Rounds, will address several of the most common obstacles encountered by acute care surgeons navigating multidisciplinary goals-of-care and prognostic discussions, as well as complex surrogate situations. Specifically, it examines how to create and deliver a cohesive and consistent message from a multidisciplinary team, the role of surgeon-led palliative care discussions with and without formal palliative care service consultation, and strategies for managing discordant surrogate decision-makers.