FAmily CEntered (FACE) Advance Care Planning for Teens With Cancer
FAmily CEntered (FACE) Advance Care Planning for Teens With Cancer
Advance Care Planning (ACP) prepares patients and their loved ones for future health care decisions, including end-of-life decisions. Yet, the needs of adolescent oncology patients for participation in ACP, despite its priority, is not well studied. Our goal is to test a model of ACP that anticipates these issues, fully empowers the family and adolescent, and keeps the key role of health care professionals central, building on our earlier work. We hypothesized FAmily CEntered (FACE) ACP, would: (1) increase congruence in treatment preferences between adolescents and surrogates; (2) decrease decisional conflict for adolescents; and (3) increase quality of communication compared with controls.
Condition The purpose of the FACE intervention is to facilitate conversations about EOL care between adolescents and their legal guardians or surrogates in order to increase congruence in treatment preferences, to decrease decisional conflict, while supporting plans and actions, psychological adjustment and quality of life. This intervention will consist of three 60 to 90-minute sessions in a dyadic format with a trained/certified interviewer. Each session will be followed by a 15 minute assessment, using process measures to assess participants' ratings of the quality of the communication with the facilitator and satisfaction (negative and positive emotions in response to session) on a Likert scale. A research assistant, not the facilitator, will conduct the immediate post evaluation sessions. A Standard of Care comparison condition will also be assessed and measures administered at the same time intervals: at baseline, one week intervals for three weeks for process measures and Statement of Treatment Preferences, and at 3 month-post intervention follow-up.
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