How to enhance readiness for advance care planning among community-dwelling older adults: A scoping review

Purpose: 1.Comprehensively identify and collate interventions designed and implemented across diverse settings—including communities and healthcare institutions—to enhance older adults' advance care planning readiness. These interventions address dimensions such as knowledge, attitudes, willingness to communicate, and behavioural intentions. 2. Conduct a detailed analysis and categorisation of the core characteristics of these interventions, including but not limited to their theoretical frameworks (such as the Health Belief Model, the Trans-Theoretical Model, mindfulness, etc.), intervention content and formats (such as educational programmes, decision-support tools, family conferences, psychological interventions, etc.), implementation methods and contexts (implementers, duration, frequency, settings), and the characteristics of the target populations (such as healthy older adults, individuals with chronic conditions, patients in the terminal stages of illness, etc.). Expected outcomes: Present the primary intervention pathways for enhancing advance care planning readiness among older adults in a visual format, such as charts or categorised frameworks (e.g., education-empowerment approaches, communication-facilitation approaches, psychological counselling approaches, decision-support approaches, and integrated multi-component approaches). Clarify the representative methods, core components, and applicable scenarios for each strategy. The inclusion criteria for this scoping review were based on the population, concept, and context (PCC) :(1) Population: older adults (age≥50 years old. This age selection is due to the shift in primary care focus towards chronic disease and cancer screening at this stage, providing healthy older adults with an opportunity to engage in ACP.); (2) Concept: This review focuses on intervention strategies to enhance older adults’ readiness for advance healthcare directives and their associated outcomes; (3) Context: Community; (4) Types of evidence: The studies included were full-length systematic studies published whose methods were quantitative, qualitative, or mixed-methods design.