Making Your Wishes Known: Who Completes an Advance Directive and Shares It With Their Health Care Team or Loved Ones?

Using Andersen's health behavioral model as a framework, this study examined factors associated with the completion of advance directives and the behavior of sharing them with one's family and health care providers. Data were from the 2014 United States of Aging Survey (N = 1,153; aged 60 or older), and multinomial logistic regression was used for analysis. We found that 73% of respondents had advance directives. However, 28% have not shared their advance directives with anyone. The sense of having completed a great deal of preparation for the future and the number of illnesses were found to be relevant to the behavior of sharing advance directives. Existing educational training and interventions can be expanded to increase public awareness and encourage people to share their completed advance directives with others. Policies mandating physicians to engage in advance directive conversations with patients during annual checkups might improve completion and sharing of advance directives.

Operationalizing Surveillance of Chronic Disease Self-Management and Self-Management Support.

Sixty percent of US adults have at least one chronic condition, and more than 40% have multiple conditions. Self-management (SM) by the individual, along with self-management support (SMS) by others, are nonpharmacological interventions with few side effects that are critical to optimal chronic disease control. Ruiz and colleagues laid the conceptual groundwork for surveillance of SM/SMS at 5 socio-ecological levels (individual, health system, community, policy, and media). We extend that work by proposing operationalized indicators at each socio-ecologic level and suggest that the indicators be embedded in existing surveillance systems at national, state, and local levels. Without a robust measurement system at the population level, we will not know how far we have to go or how far we have come in making SM and SMS a reality. The data can also be used to facilitate planning and service delivery strategies, monitor temporal changes, and stimulate SM/SMS-related research.

Coproduction of Research Questions and Research Evidence in Public Health: The Study to Prevent Teen Drinking Parties.

Community-based participatory research (CBPR) provides a set of principles and practices intended to foster coproduction of knowledge. However, CBPR often has shortcomings when applied to population-level policy and practice interventions, including a focus on single communities and a lack of focus on policy change. At the same time, community trials focused on policy have shortcomings, including lack of stakeholder involvement in framing research questions and modest engagement in study implementation and interpretation and dissemination of results. We describe an attempt to hybridize CBPR and community trials by creating a partnership that included a national membership organization, a coalition advisory board, intervention and delayed intervention communities, and an academic study team, which collaborated on a study of community strategies to prevent underage drinking parties. We use qualitative and quantitative data to critically assess the partnership. Areas where the partnership was effective included (1) identifying a research question with high public health significance, (2) enhancing the intervention, and (3) improving research methods. Challenges included community coalition representatives' greater focus on their own communities rather than the production of broader scientific knowledge. This model can be applied in future attempts to narrow the gap between research, policy, and practice.