Project Summary
Background: Honoring Choices Pacific Northwest (HCPNW) will partner with the University of California San Francisco’s PREPARE for Your Care to disseminate PREPARE for Your Care across Washington State, building upon the work completed with The Everett Clinic, Skagit Regional Health, and The Okanogan Palliative Care Initiative during a prior PCORI-funded Capacity Building Award.
Millions of older adults will face complex medical decisions over the course of advanced illness, yet most are unprepared. Lack of preparation for medical decision making can lead to uninformed choices, receipt of care inconsistent with personal goals, and lack of personal empowerment during clinical encounters. This is especially true for individuals with limited health literacy and limited English proficiency.
Proposed Solution to the Problem: To address the need for advance care planning (ACP) in vulnerable English- and Spanish-speaking populations with limited health literacy and to prepare people to make informed medical decisions, the project team created an ACP program with video stories called PREPARE for Your Care (PREPARE, PrepareForYourCare.org). The PREPARE program features easy-to-read advance directives (ADs) and an interactive, multimedia website that includes a step-by-step process.
Activities: HCPNW will use their proven strategies for designing and implementing advance care planning for a sustainable increase in ACP in Washington State. These strategies utilize a multidisciplinary approach centered around the best practices for engaging diverse and underserved populations to promote effective message and outreach strategies to increase ACP engagement.
Patient and Stakeholder Engagement Plan: HCPNW will convene with the engaged aforementioned stakeholders from diverse geographic and demographic areas to create and disseminate individualized ACP interventions. Throughout the Dissemination Award tenure, HCPNW will monitor subjective and objective learnings, trends, and data that will inform a dissemination toolkit that will be widely distributed.
At the conclusion of the Engagement Award: Dissemination Initiative project, HCPNW will create and implement PREPARE Dissemination Plans, reach > 10% of the three engaged stakeholder partners English- and Spanish-speaking communities using the PREPARE-WA Analytics Dashboard, and co-create a PREPARE Dissemination Toolkit with stakeholders.
Project Collaborators: The routine collaboration of HCPNW, along with UCSF’s PREPARE for Your Care, The Everett Clinic, Skagit Regional Health, and The Okanogan Palliative Care Initiative will result in improved ACP access for all.