A realist evaluation of advance care planning educational programs in dutch medical schools

• Grant number: 23/00823-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research
• Start date: July 10, 2023
• End date: July 09, 2024
• Field of knowledge: Health Sciences - Collective Health
• Principal Investigator: Edison Iglesias de Oliveira Vidal
• Grantee: Edison Iglesias de Oliveira Vidal
• Host Investigator: Marco Antonio de Carvalho Filho
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Medicina (FMB). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Botucatu. Botucatu , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG), Netherlands

Abstract

Advance Care Planning (ACP) aims to ensure that people receive medical care that is consistent with their values, goals and preferences in future situations related to serious illnesses. Our recent research identified a conspicuous lack of education of healthcare professionals regarding ACP in Latin America, which contributes to the occurrence of avoidable suffering at the end of life and the misuse of scarce healthcare resources through medical interventions misaligned with patients' values. The recent inclusion of palliative care into the Brazilian curricular guidelines for undergraduate medical education represents a major opportunity to promote palliative care education, including ACP, in the country. However, the literature on ACP educational programs provides little guidance into the relationships between context, mechanisms, and outcomes for those complex interventions. Because all eight Dutch medical schools have long-lasting palliative care curricula including ACP and a history of integration of palliative care into the public healthcare system, we propose a realist evaluation of ACP educational programs in Dutch medical schools to understand what kind of programs tend to work, for which type of learners, in what contexts, to what degree, and how, as a means to contribute to the theoretical and methodological basis of future educational developments on this subject around the world. The methods of this realist evaluation will be conducted in accordance with the recommendations of the RAMESES II Project and will involve the development of an initial program theory that will be tested and refined through an iterative process of qualitative realist interviews with key stakeholders involved with those programs. (AU)