Interventions in the Primary Care Setting Aimed at Improving the Rate of Completion of Advance Directives
Abstract
**Please note that the full text is embargoed** ABSTRACT: The majority of people never discuss their choice of treatment in end-of-life issues and do not
have an advance directive (AD). The cause may be due to the lack of organized efforts to achieve
completion of ADs. This project used a quasi-experimental one-group pretest-posttest design to
determine if an educational intervention increased the completion of an AD. Project results
showed that the combination of repeated written and verbal educational information about ADs
provided via a primary care setting is an effective intervention to increase completion of ADs. A
convenience sample revealed 14% of 90 primary care clinic patients had a completed AD.
Following the educational intervention for those patients without an AD, the completion rate was
56% (p=0.01 , 95% Confidence). The overall completion percentage in the clinic sample
increased to 62%. These results were both clinically and statistically significant, (p <0.05, 95%
Confidence).