Shared Decision Making and Renal Supportive Care

Study Summary

This year, 90,000 Americans with end-stage renal disease (ESRD) will die and questions will legitimately be raised as to whether terminal treatment and location of death adequately represented their preferences. These concerns are linked by a failure on the part of patients and staff to discuss prognosis and share in end-of-life (EOL) planning. The rate of hospice use among patients dying with ESRD is half that of the national average and one-quarter the rate for patients with terminal cancer. In other patient populations when meaningful EOL conversation occurs this is associated with increased hospice referral and improved quality of the dying. Patients receiving hemodialysis (HD) often desire but rarely communicate with staff about prognoses, know little about availability of community hospice resources, or how to complete advance directives. Nephrologists are not trained to have these conversations, and although accustomed to relying on interdisciplinary teams, they are unaccustomed to collaborating with community hospices. Our preliminary research began by using focus groups, created and validated the first clinically useful HD prognostic tool, and developed a prototype for Shared Decision Making and Renal Supportive Care (SDM-RSC). This is a novel multimodal intervention that familiarizes patients, families, and dialysis staff with community hospice resources, emphasizes dialysis social work support, conveys information about terminal care issues, and encourages advance care planning. The proposed study tests the central hypothesis that EOL care can be improved by relying on patients and stakeholders to enhance SDM-RSC for HD patients who are most likely to die. It will test whether an intervention that targets communication deficiencies can alter EOL outcomes and achieve the goal of matching patient preferences with terminal treatments.

Interventions

• BEHAVIORAL advance care planning