A Multicenter Implementation Study of the 3 Wishes Project

The 3 Wishes Project (3WP) was created to promote the connections between patients, family members, and clinicians that are foundational to empathic end-of-life care. It provides a scaffold for discussions about preferences and values at the end of life and leads to acts of compassion that arise from soliciting and implementing wishes that honour the dying patient. In a single center, investigators previously reported how the 3 Wishes Project forges interpersonal connections among patients, family members and clinicians, eases family grief, and offers experiential end of life education for clinicians-in-training. The objective of this study was to evaluate whether the 3 Wishes Project could enhance compassionate care for dying patients and their families when implemented as a multicenter program. Given the importance of empowering frontline staff to adapt the 3WP to their own practice patterns, investigators did not protocolize this approach to personalizing end-of-life care. Investigators conceptualized this study as a formative evaluation of 3WP to examine its 1) Value: as experienced by family members, frontline clinicians, ICU managers and hospital administrators; 2) Transferability: successful implementation beyond the original ICU by a different mix of clinicians; 3) Affordability: cost of wishes being less than $50/patient; 4) Sustainability: project continuation beyond the first year of evaluation.