A Randomized Clinical Trial of Scenario Planning for Older Adults with Serious Injury

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ABSTRACT For older adults, poor communication about serious injury and life-limiting illness has consequences for patients and families, clinicians, and healthcare systems. Afflicting 500,000 older adults annually, treatment for traumatic injury frequently involves burdensome interventions (like prolonged life support), major changes in functional or cognitive status, and high mortality. Surgeons use mortality statistics to communicate about the gravity of illness, but current communication standards often lead to goal discordant care, moral distress for clinicians, and prolongation of the dying process. Given high treatment burdens and frequency of poor prognosis, seriously injured older adults would benefit from communication interventions that clarify patients' goals, alleviate conflict in the ICU, and reduce unwanted invasive procedures for dying patients. A Randomized Clinical Trial of Scenario Planning for Older Adults with Serious Injury is a 5-year R01 Clinical Trial that responds specifically to NOSI-AG-20-041 for evaluation of decision support tools and communication aids for seriously ill older patients and their surrogate decision-makers to achieve goal- concordant care. We have developed a novel communication tool called Best Case/Worst Case-ICU that uses scenario planning—narrative description of plausible futures—and a graphic aid to illustrate information about the patient's care trajectory and overall prognosis for daily use in the trauma ICU. We pilot tested this intervention and found that surgeons can use this tool to support families and it may improve quality of communication and reduce clinician moral distress. We are now ready to test the intervention in a large-scale effectiveness study. We propose a pragmatic multisite randomized clinical trial following 4,500 older adults with traumatic injury. We aim to test the effectiveness of the Best Case/Worst Case-ICU intervention on quality of communication (Aim 1), clinician moral distress (Aim 2), and length of stay in the ICU (Aim 3). This award will allow us to test an intervention that is easily scalable and can be disseminated rapidly for use with older adults with serious illness. The research is innovative because it tests scenario planning —a decision-making strategy that has been successfully applied in business and government—but is not widely used in healthcare. The research is significant because, if we demonstrate effectiveness, it has the potential to transform how surgeons and other ICU clinicians talk with patients and families about treatment and prognosis and dramatically improve care older adults receive in the trauma ICU. Our multidisciplinary team has a long history of collaboration and is well positioned to achieve our objectives. The feasibility of this study is enhanced by support from the Coalition for National Trauma Research, which comprises the major trauma professional organizations in the United States and uses the American College of Surgeons' Trauma Quality Improvement Program as a data collection platform.