Evaluating an Advance Care Planning Skills Training for Medical, Nursing, and Social Work Students

Advance care planning (ACP) helps to ensure future healthcare is congruent with individual preferences. Curricula for health-focused professions rarely include ACP content. This is a repeated measures evaluation of an innovative, interprofessional student training to enhance the ability to lead ACP discussions. Outcomes were measured via self-report surveys at two timepoints (baseline = T1 [n = 35]; posttraining follow-up = T2 [n = 20]) and included validated measures of communication self-efficacy, ACP self-efficacy, and interprofessional teamwork. Data collection from a third timepoint (T3), following randomized group assignment is currently underway. The matched T1–T2 sample (N = 17) included students from medicine (64.7%), nursing (17.6%), and social work (17.6%). Participants were largely young (M=26 years), non-Hispanic (94.0%), White (59.0%), and female (71.0%). Paired t tests examined change from T1 to T2 for all outcomes. Despite worse communication self-efficacy (Mdiff=1.6, p<.001) and ACP self-efficacy (Mdiff=.92, p<.001), perceptions of interprofessional teamwork improved (Mdiff=3.0, p=.008). These T1–T2 findings mirror results from similar, prior research, which subsequently discovered that both self-efficacy outcomes and their effect sizes for change worsened at T2, but ultimately and substantially improved at T3. These fluctuations suggest participants initially overestimated their self-efficacy related to ACP at T1 and corrected their appraisals at T2. Other studies should account for this self-correction. Further replication is needed to understand the dip that appears to occur before anticipated improvements occur.