Improving advance care planning for English-speaking and Spanish-speaking older adults: study protocol for the PREPARE randomised controlled trial.

ABSTRACT: INTRODUCTION:Advance care planning (ACP) is a process that allows patients to identify their goals for medical care. Traditionally, ACP has focused on completing advance directives; however, we have expanded the ACP paradigm to also prepare patients to communicate their wishes and make informed decisions. To this end, we created an ACP website called PREPARE (http://www.prepareforyourcare.org) to prepare diverse English-speaking and Spanish-speaking older adults for medical decision-making. Here, we describe the study protocol for a randomised controlled efficacy trial of PREPARE in a safety-net setting. The goal is to determine the efficacy of PREPARE to engage diverse English-speaking and Spanish-speaking older adults in a full spectrum of ACP behaviours. METHODS AND ANALYSIS:We include English-speaking and Spanish-speaking adults from an urban public hospital who are ?55?years old, have ?2 chronic medical conditions and have seen a primary care physician ?2 times in the last year. Participants are randomised to the PREPARE intervention (review PREPARE and an easy-to-read advance directive) or the control arm (only the easy-to-read advance directive). The primary outcome is documentation of an advance directive and/or ACP discussion. Secondary outcomes include ACP behaviour change processes measured with validated surveys (eg, self-efficacy, readiness) and a broad range of ACP actions (eg, choosing a surrogate, identifying goals for care, discussing ACP with clinicians and/or surrogates). Using blinded outcome ascertainment, outcomes will be measured at 1?week and at 3, 6 and 12?months, and compared between study arms using mixed-effects logistic regression and mixed-effects linear, Poisson or negative binomial regression. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION:This study has been approved by the appropriate Institutional Review Boards and is guided by input from patient and clinical advisory boards and a data safety monitoring board. The results of this study will be disseminated to academic and community stakeholders. TRIAL REGISTRATION NUMBERS:NCT01990235; NCT02072941; Pre-results.

SUBMITTER: Sudore RL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4947727 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature