The informal discussion of advance care planning among Chinese older adults: Do education and social media use matter?
Yaolin Pei, Xiang Qi, Zheng Zhu and 3 others
PMID 37956600WHAT IT FOUND
End-of-life care discussion with family was under 33% among older Chinese adults in Wuhan, Taichung, and Honolulu.
Education was linked to discussion in Taichung and Honolulu, social media in Wuhan and Honolulu. In Honolulu, social media weakened the education link.
Key findings
01End-of-life care discussion with family was reported by 15.2% in Wuhan, 19.2% in Taichung, and 31.3% in Honolulu; all were below 33%.
02High school education or higher was positively associated with end-of-life care discussion in Taichung (odds ratio 2.38) and Honolulu (odds ratio 4.13).
03Social media use with friends was positively associated with end-of-life care discussion in Wuhan (odds ratio 2.03) and Honolulu (odds ratio 1.96), and in Honolulu it weakened the education association (interaction odds ratio 0.22).
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The design was cross-sectional. It cannot show that education or social media use caused end-of-life care discussion. Data were collected in 2017 and 2018. The authors note the associations may not capture post-pandemic patterns. Older adults who completed the survey may have been more comfortable discussing end-of-life care. This may have created selection bias. Except for Taichung, samples were small convenience samples from restricted regions. Results may not generalize to other Chinese communities. Missing values were deleted. The analytic samples were 534 of 705 in Wuhan, 605 of 645 in Taichung, and 249 of 311 in Honolulu.
Declared interests
The supplied text indicates NIH extramural research support. It does not provide a conflicts-of-interest declaration or state that a sponsor designed or wrote the manuscript.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that social media use or education causes more end-of-life care discussion. This was a cross-sectional survey, and the associations differed by city. It does not show that an intervention would work.