Advance care planning in chronic kidney disease: A national Danish survey of knowledge and attitudes among clinicians

Introduction: Patients with chronic kidney disease and their families strongly request advance care planning. They want it to start early-before treatment decisions are made-and to be an ongoing process during their illness trajectory. Previous international studies show that health care professionals find there to be significant barriers that impact the extent of involvement in advance care planning.Aim: To identify Danish nephrology health care professionals' knowledge and attitudes to advance care planning and the status of current advance care planning practice in Denmark.Method: An anonymous, cross-sectional survey was administrated online. The questionnaire was developed in Australia and translated and culturally adapted into Danish. Health care professionals were recruited via email lists. In descriptive statistics and multiple ordinal regression, the influence of the respondents' attributes on the extent of involvement in advance care planning was explored, along with the involvement of family, and skills, comfort, barriers and facilitators in relation to advance care planning.Results: The 207 respondents comprised nephrologists (23%), other physicians (8%), nurses (62%) and other HCPs (7%), of whom 27% had participated in advance care planning training. In total, 66% indicated that they lacked access to material about advance care planning for patients with chronic kidney disease and 46% indicated that the conversations were performed ad hoc. A total of 47% reported that advance care planning was performed well at their workplace. Reported barriers were time, lack of experience and procedure. Training in advance care planning could facilitate the involvement. Nurses were less likely to feel skilled and comfortable in engaging advance care planning, while those with more than 10 years of experience were more likely to feel skilled and comfortable.Conclusion: Training in advance care planning with patients with chronic kidney disease and their families on both a theoretical and clinical level is important to ensure comfort among health care professionals and to facilitate the extent of involvement. A systematic chronic kidney disease-specific approach is significant, in order to guide the conversations and ensure that advance care planning is conducted to a set standard.

Automated summary

This study aimed to investigate the knowledge and attitudes of Danish nephrology healthcare professionals towards advance care planning (ACP) and the current status of ACP practice in Denmark. The results showed that the majority of professionals lacked access to ACP materials for chronic kidney disease patients and reported that ACP conversations were performed ad hoc. Time, lack of experience, and procedure were reported as barriers to ACP implementation. Training in ACP on both theoretical and clinical levels is crucial to improve professionals' comfort and involvement in ACP.