Mentoring Researchers in Advance Care Planning and Communication for Vulnerable Older Populations

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ABSTRACT The aims of this proposal are to (1) enable the candidate to further develop her research program focused on improving advance care planning (ACP) and informed medical decision making for vulnerable older adults and (2) use her research program as a platform for mentoring junior investigators interested in patient-oriented aging research, both within Geriatrics and other medical subspecialties. The candidate is a Geriatrician and Palliative Medicine physician who has established a high-impact independent clinical research program that is well funded with an outstanding publication record. In the 10 years since completing her Geriatrics fellowship, she has established herself as a successful mentor of students, fellows, and junior faculty who have published high-impact aging research, become successfully funded, and continue to participate in patient-oriented research in aging. The candidate has developed an extensive research portfolio focused on creating and testing literacy- and culturally appropriate health education materials to improve ACP and medical decision making for older adults. She developed a broader paradigm of ACP that focuses not only on one-time treatment decisions, such as for cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), but also on the process of preparing patients to communicate their wishes and to participate with clinicians in making real-time, complex medical decisions over the course of illness. She operationalized this paradigm into an easy-to-understand, patient- centered website called PREPARE that teaches patients, through videos, how to identify their wishes and communicate with surrogates and clinicians. The candidate received R01 funding from the NIA to test the efficacy of the PREPARE website to engage diverse, vulnerable older adults from an urban, county hospital in ACP using validated patient questionnaires. This K24 proposal will provide the candidate with protected time to expand her research in a new direction focused on direct observation (i.e., audio recording) of patient-clinician communication within primary care encounters in response to the PREPARE intervention. This new research will determine whether a patient-centered ACP website can empower and activate patients to discuss ACP and to facilitate communication with their primary care providers. The candidate will also develop her formal mentoring program with plans for the recruitment, selection, development, and evaluation of mentees who will become leaders in aging research. She will work with each mentee to establish a focused career development plan in which they complete research projects and develop the skills needed to become independent investigators. These plans will make full use of the outstanding clinical research training environment at UCSF. She will leverage her leadership positions at UCSF to recruit more mentees interested in research on ACP and aging in vulnerable populations.