Palliative Care Messaging for American Indians

Palliative care is specialized patient-/family-centered care designed to reduce suffering and enhance quality of life for persons with serious illness. Culturally responsive palliative care can ease serious illness burden experienced by American Indians (AIs) and improve seriously ill AIs end-of-life decision-making. However, for seriously ill Northern Plains AIs, specifically those in South Dakota (SD), access to and use of culturally responsive palliative care is severely limited. To address this need, the investigators have formed a multidisciplinary, tribally-driven collaborative team consisting of Great Plains Tribal Leaders Health Board, active AI community advisory boards at the following reservations: Cheyenne River, Rosebud, and Pine Ridge, and South Dakota State University. The research team will conduct a campaign messaging efficacy test using the narrative as culture-centric health promotion model (NCHP) to create and test culture-centric narrative messaging that improves knowledge of palliative care and encourages participants to engage in formal and informal communication about palliative care. The NCHP model is an evidence-based innovative approach to enhance AI's knowledge and intentions to talk formally and informally about palliative care, because it provides guidelines for how to construct culture-centric narratives which identify the features of effective narratives and the mechanisms by which the narratives work to transform cognitive and behavioral outcomes. The investigators have developed a culture-centric narrative health video message and will be conducting a randomized trial to test the efficacy of the NCHP model for increasing AI tribal members' palliative care knowledge and intentions to discuss palliative care.