Facilitated Advance Care Planning Interventions: A Narrative Review

Abstract

Introduction: Multiple interventions have been designed to employ facilitators to address gaps in Advance Care Planning (ACP). Objective: To collect and review available evidence related to facilitated ACP interventions. Methods/Design: Narrative review using a previously described framework for scoping reviews. We searched PubMed using structured criteria and report synthesized themes detailing the design, target populations, methods, and outcome measurements for interventions in which a facilitator—who may or may not be clinical staff—engaged a patient and/or a patient’s caregiver in some part of the ACP process. Results: Of 1492 articles discovered on our search, 28 met the inclusion criteria. Twelve (42.9%) studies utilized a nurse facilitator, two (7.1%) utilized trained social workers, and one (3.6%) embedded multiple facilitators. The remaining 13 (46.4%) utilized facilitators from other various professional and community backgrounds, such as lay navigators, care coordinators, and peer mentors. Twenty-five (89.2%) studies included patients with serious or chronic illness, at the end-of-life, or having a high risk of need for medical care. Four (14.3%) articles focused on marginalized populations. Intervention settings varied notably across studies. Eighteen (64.3%) integrated interventions into existing clinical workflows. Primary outcomes were measured in one of three ways: documentation in the Electronic Health Record (EHR) (25.0%); questionnaires, scales, patient reports, or non-EHR documentation (64.3%); or multiple measures (10.7%). Twenty-three (82.1%) of the studies were determined a success by study authors. Conclusion: We identified a variety of key characteristics that can be modified to target facilitated ACP interventions towards gaps in current applications of ACP.