Research in Advance Care Planning

Planning for illness involving decisional incapacity has been widely endorsed, at least in principle. How best to accomplish it has been less clear, however. To remedy this lack of practical guidance, considerable research has been devoted to the field. This chapter addresses seven areas of research in advance care planning, each of which has enjoyed progress but needs further research: theoretical development of the rationale for advance care planning; considerations regarding the conditions under which advance directives can be authentic; epidemiological tracking of indicators and outcome measures; issues concerning ethnicity and culture; guidance for clinical practices; outcome measures; and policy development. Research in advance care planning has covered a range of methodologies, from applied philosophy to epidemiology and survey methodology, from ethnology to economics and policy analysis.