End of Life clinical trials at UCLA

Dignified and compassionate end-of-life (EOL) care is a cornerstone of high-quality, patient-centered care, but in safety-net hospitals EOL care is often overlooked, considered too late, or not at all. By eliciting and implementing final wishes for dying patients, the 3 Wishes Project (3WP) has demonstrated, in tertiary academic centers, that acts of compassion can improve the EOL experience and help families cope with loss. The investigators propose to implement the 3WP in safety-net hospitals where there are less resources and more diverse, disadvantaged patient populations, and hypothesize that there will be similar positive effects on the EOL experience for patients, families, and clinicians.

This multicenter, triple-blind, phase 2, randomized controlled trial will evaluate the efficacy and safety of psilocybin therapy compared to an active control in treating demoralization in adults near the end of life (≤2 years life expectancy).

Using a cluster randomized design at the clinic level, this project will implement and test three real-world, scalable advance care planning interventions among primary care clinics across three University of California health systems. Seriously ill patients identified using data from the electronic health record will receive (1) an advance directive with targeted messaging, (2) intervention 1 plus prompting to engage with the Prepare For Your Care website, or (3) intervention 2 plus engagement from a clinic-based facilitator. A Research cohort of patients will provide complete surveys at baseline, 12 and 24 months. The main outcomes are advance directive completion among the population cohort and goal concordant care among the Research cohort at 12 months.