Chapter 6 126 Table 1. Baseline patient characteristics of the patient populations Before interventions n= 149 After interventions n= 184 Statistical comparison Age - ≤44 years - 45-64 years - 65-74 years - 75-84 years - ≥85 years 31 (21.1%) 55 (37.4%) 44 (29.9%) 12 (8.2%) 5 (3.4%) 27 (14.8%) 72 (39.6%) 45 (24.7%) 33 (18.1%) 5 (2.7%) p= 0.107 Gender (male (%)) 82 (56.2%) 106 (58.6%) p= 0.663 Educational level - Primary education - Secondary education - Middle education - Higher education 10 (7.0%) 32 (22.5%) 50 (35.2%) 50 (35.2%) 7 (3.9%) 65 (36.3%) 58 (32.4%) 49 (27.4%) p= 0.082 Health perception - Poor - Average - Good - Very good - Excellent 26 (17.9%) 57 (39.3%) 52 (35.9%) 7 (4.8%) 3 (2.1%) 38 (20.9%) 81 (44.5%) 52 (28.6%) 9 (4.9%) 2 (1.1%) p= 0.174 Family member present at ED (yes (%)) 119 (81%) 144 (79.1%) p= 0.680 Chi-square test was used for nominal data and Mann Whitney U for ordinal data. <5% missing values. ED = emergency department First, we handled the Quality of Communication questionnaire in accordance with Engelberg: substituting sample median values for responses of “don’t know” or “no response”; and imputing a value of 0 for “doctor didn’t do this”25, except for the items “talking about how long you have to live” and “ talking about what dying might be like”. Although we anticipated these two items to be less applicable and therefore discussed less often (which is why we did not intend to impute “doctor didn’t do this” with a zero, but with the sample median instead) we did not expect to only have a grade in 21/333 (6.3%) questionnaires for “talking about how long you have to live” and 13/333 (3.9%) for “talking about what dying might be like”. We therefore omitted these two items. Then, we calculated the median score on the 5 remaining items for care decision communication, the median score for the 6 items for general communication, and the total median quality of communication score. Table 2 shows the results of the univariate comparison of these scores between the groups before and after the interventions. As they were not normally distributed, we used Mann Whitney U to test for statistical
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