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Background: The importance of advance care planning (ACP) has been recognized in the palliative care of patients with heart failure. It is necessary for dissemination of ACP to characterize the perceptions of physicians and nurses towards ACP and to promote mutual understanding. The aim of this study is to investigate the perceptions of physicians and nurses concerning ACP for patients with heart failure.Methods: We conducted a self-administered questionnaire survey with physicians and nurses who belonged to the 427 certified institutions for implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) and/or cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) in Japan. The self-administered questionnaire was originally designed based on the guidelines on palliative care or ACP and previous studies on the barriers of ACP. We asked the participants the recognition about condition/timing to implement ACP, Content of care to be implemented in ACP, and barriers against implementing ACP. A Mann-Whitney U test was performed and r value was calculated an effect size (ES) in order to evaluate the characteristic perceptions among physicians and nurses.Results: Valid responses were obtained from 163 physicians (38.2%) and 208 nurses (48.7%). Regarding the condition/timing, nurses tended to recognize that ACP should be implemented from earlier clinical stages than physicians. Regarding the contents of ACP, both physicians and nurses placed emphasis in assessing the patient's perception of disease progression. The biggest difference was found in the item "Ask patient about what has been important in life so far"; 78.6% of physicians but 94.2% of nurses chose "it must/should be implemented" (Cohen's r=0.31). Regarding the barriers, both physicians and nurses recognized the difficulty in prognosis prediction. The biggest differences were found in the items "Medical staff does not know how to implement ACP for patients and their families" (45.6% of physicians and 70.4% of nurses chose "strongly agree/agree", r=0.27), and "There is disagreement regarding care goals among team members of different professions" (18.5% in physicians and 43.3% in nurses, r=0.27). Conclusions:It is suggested that discussions and further studies are necessary concerning the condition/ timing of implementing ACP from early stages, specific manuals/protocols and recommendation on rolesharing within a multidisciplinary team.

Relatives of type 2 diabetic patients are at a high risk of developing type 2 diabetes and should be regarded as target of intervention for diabetes prevention. However, it is usually hard to motivate them to implement preventive lifestyle changes, because of lack of opportunity to take advises from medical professionals, inadequate risk perception, and low priority for preventive behavior. Prevention strategy for them therefore should be highly acceptable and suited for them. The parallel, three-group trial is now being conducted to investigate the effects of genetic counseling and/or a computerized behavioral program on the prevention of type 2 diabetes in that population. The preventive strategies used in this study could provide a novel solution to the numbers of genetically high-risk individuals, if found to be effective. The objective of this paper is to describe the background, protocol, and baseline patient characteristics of the trial.

The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of diabetes genetic counseling on attitudes toward diabetes and its heredity in relatives of type 2 diabetes patients. This study was an unmasked, randomized controlled trial at a medical check-up center in Japan. Subjects in this study are healthy adults between 30 and 60 years of age who have a family history of type 2 diabetes in their first degree relatives. Participants in the intervention group received a brief genetic counseling session for approximately 10 min. Genetic counseling was structured based on the Health Belief Model. Both intervention and control groups received a booklet for general diabetes prevention. Risk perception and recognition of diabetes, and attitude towards its prevention were measured at baseline, 1 week and 1 year after genetic counseling. Participants who received genetic counseling showed significantly higher recognition about their sense of control over diabetes onset than control group both at 1 week and 1 year after the session. On the other hand, anxiety about diabetes did not change significantly. The findings show that genetic counseling for diabetes at a medical check center helped adults with diabetes family history understand they are able to exert control over the onset of their disease through lifestyle modification.

The ES-SMBPA-CHD is reasonably reliable and valid and is expected to prove useful for the assessment of patients' self-management behavior and for individualized instruction.