BACKGROUND: There is heightened emphasis on teaching end-of-life (EOL) care in the medical school curriculum, but a relative paucity of tools focused on assessing key attitudinal changes due to curricula. OBJECTIVE: We sought to evaluate the responsiveness of two validated measures of relevant attitudes to changes caused by two EOL curricula: a year-long Elective and a day-long Inter-Clerkship for medical undergraduates. DESIGN: A case control design (n = 100) and a one group pretest-posttest design (n = 98) were used to ask: (1) Are these two attitudinal measures responsive to changes induced by two undergraduate EOL curricula? (2) Do these two curricula have an additive effect (i.e., taking both yields a stronger attitudinal change than taking only one)? (3) Are there attitudinal and sociodemographic differences between students who took the year-long elective EOL course and those who did not? SUBJECTS: Undergraduate medical students. MEASUREMENTS: Two self-report measures: Concept of a Good Death and Concerns about Dying. RESULTS: Compared to nonelective participants, Elective participants reported less concern about working with dying patients at the end of the course and increased their valuation of clinical criteria in thinking about a "good death." There were trends suggesting decreased general concern about dying and increased valuation of closure, and an interaction suggesting a larger impact on those with higher precourse concern scores. There were no differences between elective and nonelective participants at baseline. The Interclerkship increased students' valuation of personal control aspects of death, and there was a trend in reducing concerns about working with dying patients. We did not find an additive effect of taking both curricula. CONCLUSIONS: We conclude that both measures were responsive to the relatively large effects this study would have been able to detect, and may be useful in future research to substantiate the effectiveness of EOL curricula in influencing attitudes and level of comfort with death and dying.

Advance care planning requires an explicit and comprehensive discussion of patient values and conceptualization of quality of life. The Living Well open-ended interview intervention was developed to help patients and their health care agents to engage in a meaningful discussion of values so that decisions made in the last year of life are made with the patients' values in mind. We used qualitative and quantitative analysis to streamline this 10-question interview, and to generate hypotheses for future research. Interviews with 52 terminally ill patients were coded according to methodological weaknesses and content (support, spirit/feelings, palliative care, and quality of life). Node analysis revealed that three primary and three backup/probe questions yielded information that minimized misinformation, sampled from all four content areas, led to discussions of importance for good planning and decision-making, and may have led to earlier hospice admission than the national average. Two emerging themes, Generativity (passing on values or assets to the next generation) and essence (simple pleasures in everyday life), and were then quantitatively analyzed. People who mentioned generativity tended to be older, had a longer length of hospice stay, and a longer time to death after interview, compared to those who did not mention the theme. People who mentioned essence also tended to be older, but tended to have a shorter length of hospice stay and a shorter time to death after the interview. We conclude that this interview may improve access to hospice, and that generativity and essence are worthwhile themes for future research.