Advance Care Planning and Communication Skills Improve after an Interprofessional Team Simulation with Standardized Patients

BACKGROUND: Improving rates of advance care planning (ACP) and advance directive completion is a recognized goal of health care in the United States. No prior study has examined the efficacy of standardized patient (SP)-based student interprofessional ACP trainings. OBJECTIVES: The present study aims to evaluate an interprofessional approach to ACP education using SP encounters. DESIGN: We designed a pre–post evaluation of an innovative interprofessional ACP training curriculum using multimodal adult learning techniques to test the effects of completing ACP discussions with SPs. Three surveys (pre-training T1, post-training T2, and post-clinical encounter T3) evaluated student knowledge, Communication Self-Efficacy (CSES), ACP self-efficacy, and interprofessional teamwork (using SPICE-R2). SETTING/SUBJECTS: Students from the schools of medicine, nursing, and social work attended three training modules and two SP encounters focused on ACP. MEASUREMENTS/RESULTS: During academic year 2018–2019, 36 students participated in the training at University of Maryland. Results demonstrated statistically significant improvements in ACP self-efficacy, M(T1) = 2.9 (standard deviation [SD](T1) = 0.61) compared with M(T3) = 3.9 (SD(T3) = 0.51), p < 0.001, and CSES, M(T1) = 4.6 (SD(T1) = 1.35) versus M(T3) = 7.3 (SD(T3) = 0.51), p < 0.001, from T1 to T3. There was a medium-to-large improvement in knowledge from an average score of 4.3 (SD = 1.0) at T1 to an average score of 5.5 (SD = 1.4) at T2, p = 0.005, d = 0.67. CONCLUSIONS: Our interprofessional training module and SP encounter was successful in improving medical, social work, and nursing students' self-reported communication skills and knowledge regarding ACP.