I've been a doctor for four years now and I'm still trying to find the right way to talk about code status.

As a resident, I'd often have these conversations with the help of a phone interpreter.

And as I heard my words translated into Bengali or Spanish or Mandarin,

I'd so often see my patience just get more and more confused.

These days I'm anachronist at a cancer hospital.

Many of my patients have widely metastatic disease, and they're no stranger to these conversations about life and death but they're hard conversations to have.

And sometimes it just feels like I'm giving my patient an unwanted reminder of their mortality.

I wanted to know how to get better,

and given that we ask interns to start having these conversations on day one,

I can imagine I'm not the only one who's had trouble finding the right words.

So today we're going to talk about code status.

Welcome back to At the Bedside. I'm Margot. I'm Joffer. And I'm Tamar.

I'd like to introduce Dr. Juliet Jacobson, a palliative care physician and the medical director for the continuum project, an MGH initiative to support and promote the practice of generalist palliative care.

I've been at Mass General, oh for about 15 years now, and I've been

watching people struggle with code status conversations for that long, I've certainly struggled with them myself.

We'll be focusing on conversations about code status that happen on admission to the hospital

and revisited when an inpatient is getting sicker.

To really capture the breadth of these conversations,

we also spoke with physicians who talk about code status with inpatients on a regular basis.

I'm Jamie Ritchie.

I am one of the overnight hospitalists at Memorial

So and Kettering Cancer Center. My name is David. I trained in pulmonary and

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