Informing the Elderly: A Comparison of Four Methods

Providing elderly persons with understandable information with which they can make informed health care decisions is a difficult, yet critical, task. Four methods of enhancing understanding of the Resident's Bill of Rights were evaluated in residents of the board and care section of a long-term care facility. The methods included the use of large print and simplified language, a storybook, and a videotape. There was no significant improvement for performance on the comprehension test after any of the methods of presentation of the Bill of Rights. A number of subjects were found to be very deficient in short term memory or in verbal knowledge. When these subjects were eliminated from the analyses, significant improvement was demonstrated with the simplified version of the Bill of Rights yielding the most improvement. These findings indicate that many elderly people can benefit from an informed consent procedure that provides information clearly and simply. Furthermore, with relatively simple cognitive screening procedures, it should be possible to identify those unable to process the information necessary to participate in common health care decisions.