Advance Care Planning Preferences in Older Adults with Lung Cancer

This study focuses on improving communication and decision-making for older adults in Taiwan who have lung cancer, along with their families. Lung cancer has a high incidence and mortality rate, particularly affecting the elderly. Due to cultural norms, medical decisions in Taiwan are often made collectively by families rather than individually by patients. The study aims to address this issue by enhancing how patients and their potential surrogates discuss and agree on preferences for life-sustaining treatments, ensuring these decisions align with the patient's wishes. This is important as it can help avoid misunderstandings and ensure that the patient's autonomy and preferences are respected, potentially improving the quality of care they receive. The study explores different methods to encourage meaningful conversations between patients and their families about life-sustaining treatment preferences. By assessing current communication tools and possibly developing more engaging ways to discuss these important issues, the study measures whether these interventions increase the consistency of medical decisions with the patients' wishes. While it doesn't specify the exact methods used for these interventions, it highlights the need for strategies that are more appealing and effective than those currently available, like board games for Advance Care Planning. The goal is to find better ways to facilitate these critical discussions, ultimately improving patient care and satisfaction with medical decisions.