Awareness and Attitudes Toward Advance Care Planning Among Community-Dwelling Older Adults in China: A Mixed-Methods Study

Abstract

Context: Quality of palliative care and death in mainland China is at a low level of the rest of the world, the public is lacked of proper understanding of the relevant information is one of the important reasons. There has been a shift in policy of palliative care in municipalities recently in mainland China. Objectives: To measure the advance care planning-related knowledge and attitudes of Chinese community-dwelling older adults, in the hope of presenting a specific implementation of the strategy. Methods: We conducted a mixed-method sequential explanatory study, composed of a quantitative survey followed by qualitative interviews. The first quantitative phase included 523 community elderly individuals, who completed a validated questionnaire. After statistical analysis, a semistructured qualitative interview has been developed and conducted with 16 of them in order to help explain findings obtained in the first phase. Results: The study was conducted with 523 community-dwelling older adults. The cognition level of advance care planning (ACP) was low, and attitude toward ACP was active. Living alone or living with a spouse (and children), have a religion, poor health condition, and life-sustaining treatment-related experience can affect how they behave with ACP. However, lack of trust in ACP, lack of life education and relevant legislation or policies, and Chinese traditional culture and emotion may impede their take-up. Conclusions: This study indicated that the awareness and participation of ACP of community-dwelling older adults in mainland China are not enough. The influence of national conditions and culture should be fully considered during the process of ACP development.