Interventions in the Primary Care Setting Aimed at Improving the Completion Rate of Advance Directives
1assistant professor, Angelo State University, 2601 W Ave N, San Angelo, TX 76904, USA
2associate professor, University of Texas at Arlington, 701 South Nedderman Drive, Arlington, Texas, USA
Denise Goddard, DNP, MSN, FNP-C, RN, Maureen Courtney, PhD., MSN, FNP-BC, RN, “Interventions
in the Primary Care Setting Aimed at Improving the Completion Rate of Advance Directives”. American Research
Journal of Nursing. 2017; 3(1): 1-8.
Abstract
The majority of people never discuss their choice of treatment in end-of-life issues and do not
have an advance directive (AD). The cause may be due to the lack of organized professional efforts to achieve
completion of ADs. This project used a quasi-experimental one-group pretest-posttest design to determine if
an educational intervention increased the completion of an AD. Project results showed that the combination
of repeated written and verbal educational information about ADs provided via a primary care setting is an
effective intervention to increase completion of ADs. A convenience sample revealed 14% of 90 primary care
clinic patients had a completed AD. Following the educational intervention for those patients without an AD,
the completion rate was 56% (p=0.01, 95% Confidence). The overall completion percentage in the clinic sample
increased to 62%. These results were both clinically and statistically significant, (p <0.05, 95% Confidence).
