Continuing Education Outcomes for Advance Care Planning: A Systematic Review of the Literature.

Introduction: Advance care planning (ACP) is a process of considering future health and care needs for a time when a person may be unable to speak for themselves. Health professional continuing education programs have been proposed for facilitating patient participation in ACP; however, their impacts on participants, patient and clinical outcomes, and organizational approaches to ACP are not well understood.

Methods: This systematic literature review examined interventional studies of education programs conducted with health professionals and care staff across a broad range of settings.

Advance care planning in the context of clinical deterioration: a systematic review of the literature.

Background: A Rapid Response Team can respond to critically ill patients in hospital to prevent further deterioration and unexpected deaths. However, approximately one-third of reviews involve a patient approaching the end-of-life. It is not well understood whether patients have pre-existing advance care plans at the time of significant clinical deterioration requiring Rapid Response Team review.

Great expectations: perspectives on cochlear implantation of deaf children in Norway.

The authors describe the use of cochlear implants with deaf children in Norway and examine how this intervention has raised new expectations and some tensions concerning the future of education for deaf students. They report on two studies of communication within school learning environments of young children with implants in Norwegian preschools and primary/elementary schools. These studies involved observations of classroom discourse and teaching activity and interviews with teachers, administrators, parents, and pupils.