Blended news delivery in healthcare: a framework for injecting good news into bad news conversations.

Clinicians often inject good news into bad news delivery, and they do so for a variety of reasons. We present a framework that draws from research in the fields of health and social psychology to shed light on situations in which clinicians add superfluous good news into bad news conversations in an effort to ease the conversation or mitigate patients' distress, a broad strategy we refer to as blended news delivery. Our framework includes predictors of clinicians' use of blended news delivery, characteristics of blended news and outcomes of this strategy for both patients and clinicians. This framework addresses a common aspect of health communication and can direct future research on ideal strategies for and likely consequences of blended news delivery and communication more broadly.