Clinical trial NCT06277310: Implementation of the 3 Wishes Project in Safety-Net Hospitals
Official title: Personalized End of Life Care in Safety-Net Hospitals: Implementation of the 3 Wishes Project
Study type: INTERVENTIONAL
Overall status: ACTIVE_NOT_RECRUITING
Phase: NA
Conditions: End of Life
Lead sponsor: University of California, Los Angeles
Sponsor class: OTHER
Collaborators: name: Olive View-UCLA Education & Research Institute
name: LAC+USC Medical Center
First posted: 2024-02-26
Enrollment: 900
Sex: ALL
Minimum age (years): 18
Standard ages: ADULT
OLDER_ADULT
Accepts healthy volunteers: no
Allocation: NA
Intervention model: SINGLE_GROUP
Intervention model description: This is a before and after stepped wedge study design
Primary purpose: SUPPORTIVE_CARE

Brief summary: Dignified and compassionate end-of-life (EOL) care is a cornerstone of high-quality, patient-centered care, but in safety-net hospitals EOL care is often overlooked, considered too late, or not at all. By eliciting and implementing final wishes for dying patients, the 3 Wishes Project (3WP) has demonstrated, in tertiary academic centers, that acts of compassion can improve the EOL experience and help families cope with loss. The investigators propose to implement the 3WP in safety-net hospitals where there are less resources and more diverse, disadvantaged patient populations, and hypothesize that there will be similar positive effects on the EOL experience for patients, families, and clinicians.

Detailed description: Compassionate end-of-life (EOL) care is foundational to medicine, but providing patients and families in safety-net hospitals (SNHs) with the sense that they are physically and emotionally supported during a patient's terminal hospitalization can be challenging. SNHs are public hospitals that primarily provide services to low-income and uninsured patients on a minimal budget. Although high quality EOL care is an important unmet need in SNHs, its provision is fraught with barriers and challenges. Language barriers, low health literacy, and cultural differences can make it difficult for families in SNHs to perceive empathy and support during the EOL. Deaths in the intensive care unit (ICU) for underserved families can be traumatic, and families of patients who die in the ICU often suffer from depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. Palliative care interventions are needed, but implementation is often resource-prohibitive.

The 3 Wishes Project (3WP) is a palliative care intervention that aims to achieve a dignified and compassionate EOL experience by empowering the clinical team to elicit and fulfill small wishes for critically ill patients who are dying in the ICU. Although the 3WP has been shown to improve a family's experience of their loved one's EOL care, ease bereavement, and enhance clinician work satisfaction in academic centers, it has not been implemented and evaluated in low-resource hospitals. The investigators believe that this patient-centered and clinician-partnered initiative can improve the EOL experience in SNHs, but that it must be adapted to the contextual differences and needs of low-resource hospitals.

Investigators propose to obtain and use stakeholder input to customize a multi-component 3WP Toolkit that will facilitate 3WP implementation in SNHs. Using the tailored Toolkit, the investigators will implement and evaluate the 3WP in the three SNHs of the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services. The investigators will conduct a pragmatic type 2 hybrid effectiveness-implementation study to evaluate the quality of EOL ICU care, bereaved families' psychological symptoms, and clinician burnout as compared to usual care. The Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research (CFIR) and the RE-AIM (Reach, Effectiveness, Adoption, Implementation, and Maintenance) framework will be used to guide a mixed-methods evaluation of the 3WP implementation in SNHs.

Eligibility criteria: Inclusion Criteria:

* For participation in the 3WP, if there was a decision to withdraw life support or the health care team agreed that the patient's probability of dying in the hospital or on discharge to hospice was \>95% For surveys, next of kin/surrogate of a patient who died in the ICU during the study period For surveys, speaks English or Spanish

Exclusion Criteria:

* \<18 years old
* does not speak english or spanish

Primary outcomes:
measure: Families' assessment of the quality of end-of-life, particularly in emotional and spiritual support.
timeFrame: 3 months after patient's death (families will be surveyed 3 months after the date of death).
Secondary outcomes:
measure: Family anxiety and depression
timeFrame: 3 months after patient's death (families will be surveyed 3 months after the date of death).
measure: Nurse Burnout
timeFrame: 6 months and 1 year after
measure: Family PTSD
timeFrame: 3 months after patient's death (families will be surveyed 3 months after the date of death).
Other outcomes:
Locations:
city: Los Angeles
country: United States
facility: LA General Hospital
state: California
city: Los Angeles
country: United States
facility: Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center
state: California
city: Sylmar
country: United States
facility: Olive View Medical Center
state: California
city: Torrance
country: United States
facility: Harbor-UCLA
state: California
Study officials:
References:
citation: Neville TH, Clarke F, Takaoka A, Sadik M, Vanstone M, Phung P, Hjelmhaug K, Hainje J, Smith OM, LeBlanc A, Hoad N, Tam B, Reeve B, Cook DJ. Keepsakes at the End of Life. J Pain Symptom Manage. 2020 Nov;60(5):941-947. doi: 10.1016/j.jpainsymman.2020.06.011. Epub 2020 Jun 21.
citation: Vanstone M, Neville TH, Clarke FJ, Swinton M, Sadik M, Takaoka A, Smith O, Baker AJ, LeBlanc A, Foster D, Dhingra V, Phung P, Xu XS, Kao Y, Heels-Ansdell D, Tam B, Toledo F, Boyle A, Cook DJ. Compassionate End-of-Life Care: Mixed-Methods Multisite Evaluation of the 3 Wishes Project. Ann Intern Med. 2020 Jan 7;172(1):1-11. doi: 10.7326/M19-2438. Epub 2019 Nov 12.
citation: Vanstone M, Neville TH, Swinton ME, Sadik M, Clarke FJ, LeBlanc A, Tam B, Takaoka A, Hoad N, Hancock J, McMullen S, Reeve B, Dechert W, Smith OM, Sandhu G, Lockington J, Cook DJ. Expanding the 3 Wishes Project for compassionate end-of-life care: a qualitative evaluation of local adaptations. BMC Palliat Care. 2020 Jun 30;19(1):93. doi: 10.1186/s12904-020-00601-5.
citation: Cook DJ, Clarke FJ, Neville TH, Hoad N, Boyle A, Woods A, Dionne JC, Dennis BB, Toledo F, Tam B, Swinton M, Reid J, Vanstone M. The 3 Wishes Project: toward spiritual care at the end of life. Pol Arch Intern Med. 2023 Mar 29;133(3):16465. doi: 10.20452/pamw.16465. Epub 2023 Mar 29. No abstract available.
citation: Neville TH, Taich Z, Walling AM, Bear D, Cook DJ, Tseng CH, Wenger NS. The 3 Wishes Program Improves Families' Experience of Emotional and Spiritual Support at the End of Life. J Gen Intern Med. 2023 Jan;38(1):115-121. doi: 10.1007/s11606-022-07638-7. Epub 2022 May 17.