Efficacy of Self-education Program for Advanced Care Planning: A Randomized Controlled Trial

This study validates effectiveness of educational materials that the investigators developed due to the rates of completing advanced care planning are considerably low and patients relatively less less preferred to receive palliative care and hospice at terminal status, which is led by the lack of information available to patients; whether these decision aids change end-of-life care preference, elevate the preference of patients toward advanced care planning, reduce the burden of decision making compare to educational resources that are currently available.

Previous studies inform that educational video about advanced care planning increases the knowledge of care for life prolongation, and affects the preference towards care for life prolongation and palliative care. However, being no resources are provided and orally explained, patients in the control group don't have enough time to fully aware of the information, also, since those studies are done mostly in the western countries, 'discussing with family members or guardians' part is missing, which is critical under contemporary Korean medical society. This study provides educational resources to both the intervention group and the control group and identifies if advanced care planning is discussed with family members or guardians.

Primary outcome of this study is end-of-life care preference. Participants of this study will fill out the baseline questionnaire about end-of-life care preference, end-of-life discussion and documentation, knowledge of ACP, etc. After that, participants will be allocated equally into the intervention group and the control group. The intervention group will receive a book and videos about advanced care planning which are based on Smart Management Strategy for Health(SMASH). The control group will receive a book and videos about pain control for cancer patients that were provided by Korea National Cancer Center. After reading and watching the educational materials, patients will get another questionnaire about knowledge of ACP, satisfaction on the materials, end-of-life care preference, and decision role preference. Participants will read and watch the materials for about 6-8 weeks and then they will be asked to complete another questionnaire which includes every questions from the baseline and post-intervention. The result from all three questionnaires (baseline, post-intervention, 7-week questionnaire) will be compiled and be compared with one another.