TITLE: Improving Primary Care Teams’ Confidence in Advance Care Planning for People with Dementia Through an ACP Communication Toolkit: Findings from the AD-ACP Trial

TAKE AWAY : Primary care providers’ confidence improved following an AD-ACP Toolkit training. Further work is needed to see if this increased confidence is durable and if it results in increased GOC discussions in an ongoing RCT.

INTRODUCTION: 

High quality ACP for people with dementia requires skilled communication from their medical teams.

Two-thirds of people with dementia never receive specialty dementia care

Most primary care providers lack dementia-specific ACP communication skills.

METHODS: 

Current RCT in 20 primary care clinics to determine the efficacy of dementia-specific training, the Alzheimer’s Disease Advance Care Planning (AD-ACP) toolkit, on ACP.

Primary care team member participants at 10 intervention clinics completed 7 questions about their ACP confidence pre- and post- AD-ACP toolkit training.

Differences in ACP confidence pre- and post- training analyzed using McNemar test, dichotomizing responses into “not very confident” or “somewhat confident” (0) versus “confident” or “very confident”

CONCLUSIONS: