Patient Understanding of End of Life Care

Partners in Internal Medicine

Status: Completed

Conditions: Advance Directives; Resuscitation Orders

Treatments: Other: Standardized explanation

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT01683097

SVH 1195

Details and patient eligibility

About

This study aims at assessing factors that affect patient choices for end of life care. 300 patients would be assigned either to a control arm (questionnaire alone) or intervention arm (standardized explanation+ questionnaire). Our intervention is a standardized explanation which explains what code status, advance directive and end of life care mean. Based on patient responses, factors that affect choices of code status would be analyzed. We will also evaluate if a standardized explanation improves patient understanding of end of life issues. This would be determined by generating a composite score of correct responses to a subset of objective questions in the questionnaire

Enrollment: 300 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 18+ years old

Volunteers: No Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• Age >18 years
• Admitted to regular nursing floor

Exclusion criteria

• altered mental status
• admitted in ICU
• positive screening for depression
• terminal illness defined as life expectancy< 100 days
• inability to consent

Trial design

Primary purpose: Health Services Research

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: None (Open label)

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300 participants in 2 patient groups

Control

No Intervention group

Description:

Questionnaire

Intervention

Experimental group

Description:

Standardized explanation followed by questionnaire

Treatment:

Other: Standardized explanation