Advance directive group education in a VA outpatient clinic.

Advance directive education is an important social work role in many medical settings. Despite its obvious benefit in terms of time-effectiveness, group education around advance directives has received little previous attention in the social work research literature. In a retrospective cohort (n = 13,913), we compared three education strategies in an attempt to evaluate their effectiveness on advance directive completion: (1) participation in a group session, (2) one or more individual sessions with a social worker, and (3) no advance directive education.