Best evidence for advance care planning in older adults with dementia and their families: an umbrella review protocol

Objective: The objective of this review is to summarize current best evidence for advance care planning in older adults with dementia and their families. Introduction: Contemporary end-of-life care cannot be fully achieved without high quality advance care planning practice, which facilitates the expression of patient preferences for treatment if they lose the capacity to decide or communicate their wishes. However, advance care planning for people experiencing dementia can be highly complex and requires additional knowledge and skills. Improving advance care planning for this vulnerable patient group is an urgent matter. Inclusion criteria: The review will include systematic reviews of quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-method studies examining advance care planning for older adults with dementia and their families, published from 2000. Methods: Published and unpublished reviews will be identified from searches of the major international databases and relevant databases for gray literature, respectively. Two independent reviewers will conduct screening, critical appraisal, and data extraction for included studies. The extracted data will include specific details about the study characteristics (e.g. setting/context, participants, and the intervention/phenomena of interest), quantitative results (including heterogeneity), and qualitative findings relevant to the review. Results of systematic reviews will be presented in tabular format and accompanied by narrative synthesis. Qualitative results will include the overall synthesis of findings. Overlap of original research studies of any design across multiple systematic reviews will be clearly identified.