A suite of tools to support decision-making with older hospitalized patients who are frail

About the Project

Our ultimate goal is to achieve more and better conversations between health care practitioners, hospitalized patients who are frail, and their family members, so that these patients can receive care that is consistent with their goals during serious illness. With funding from the Canadian Frailty Network, we recently completed a study called iDECIDE to field-test tools to help with these conversations and decisions. One tool is called “What’s Important to Me: Graphic Values History Tool”, a tool that helps patients and their family members clarify what is most important to the patient when making decisions about treatment. Another tool is a video decision aid about cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) that gives patients and families accurate information about CPR and helps them make decisions about whether or not to receive CPR. In iDECIDE, we also mapped out in detail who does what, and when, to have these kinds of conversations with patients and families in hospital. The aim of this project is to work with the Canadian Hospice Palliative Care Association (CHPCA) to share the tools we tested in the iDECIDE study with hospital-based practitioners and leaders who can use these tools to improve the quality of conversations and decisions with frail, hospitalized patients, and their families. The CHPCA has access to a large, Canada-wide network of health care professionals and leaders who will be interested in our work. The CHPCA also has very experienced communications staff and a variety of media platforms, including e-mail blasts, social media, webinars, e-publications, and national conferences, that we will use to spread our tools to end-users. We believe this partnership with CHPCA will allow us to reach a much larger number of people who can benefit from what we have learned in the iDECIDE study than we could reach as a research team alone. This will give the Canadian Frailty Network a larger return on its investment in the iDECIDE study and will ultimately help the network to achieve its goal to improve care for Canadians living with frailty and contribute to Canada’s economic and social well-being.

This project builds on previously funded CFN grant – CORE2013-30

Project Team

Principal Investigator:

John You, MD, MSc FRCPC — McMaster University

Co-Investigators:

Marilyn Swinton — McMaster University

Jessica Simon — University of Calgary

Dev Jayaraman — McGill University

Tasnim Sinuff — Sunnybrook Research Institute

Nishan Sharma — University of Calgary