Developing Narrative Messages for the P...

Advance care planning allows people to clarify and communicate their wishes for future medical care at any age or stage in their lives. However, engaging people in advance care planning is challenging, as multiple barriers exist that prevent people from identifying their wishes for end-of-life care. By taking a health marketing approach, this research aimed to develop first-person, non-fictional narrative messages for the promotion of advance care planning. Drawing on 27 qualitative interviews and the taxonomy of patient narratives, we constructed real-life stories with different content types, i.e., experience-focused content, process-focused content, and outcome-focused content. Twelve narrative scripts were developed and pre-tested with a total of N = 17 participants. The research contributes to our knowledge on narrative health promotion and paves the way for subsequent experimental investigations of narrative effects on advance care planning attitudes, beliefs, and behaviours.