Fellow Bio:
Obrad came to the U.S. from Belgrade at age 16. He completed undergrad studies at UW-Milwaukee and then worked at Marshfield Clinic in a genetics lab, eventually becoming a team leader. He also worked as a research associate for couple of years at the Max McGee Center for Juvenile Diabetes at the Medical College of Wisconsin studying genetics of type I diabetes. Obrad is excited to learn about working with communities. For the past year he has worked on a project with LOCUS fellow Katie Fowler under the mentorship of Dr. Lucille Marchand exploring how community initiatives are formed and sustained especially in the context of advance care planning.

I have been fortunate to embark on this project with a dedicated and enthusiastic team on a topic that is of extreme importance to the healthcare and community well being across the nation. Advance care planning has not been getting adaquate attention and is still low on the list of successful patient management. We are attempting to elucidate how advance care planning initiatives are formed and promoted within a community using a qualitative method for analysis. Many studies have already looked at the barriers to the completion of advance directives which are vehicles of formalizing the process of advance care planning. In our study we are interested in looking at advance care planning as a process rather than statistical outcome. Furthermore, we are interested in finding out what factors are involved at successfully promoting a health product such as advance care planning to a community and how that promotion can be sustained.

• Understand qualitative research.
• Understand the basis of advance care planning as the topic of our research.
• Understand the methods of qualitative research as it applies to our study.
• Understand the process of community initiatives.

• Advance directives (AD) as process
• Core issues to address: time, money, dedicated staff, leadership, competition, attitudes, cohesiveness.
• Shift in paradigm
• Defining outcome measures

The study is still pending. Time has been a factor.

Comments:

I am so happy to have been involved in this research with a winning team and would like to thank Katie and Dr. Marchand for having me work with them on this important subject.

March 21, 2003

A indicates the item has been completed.

Completed	When	What	On-line
	Year 1: Beginning of Semester 2	New Project Report	Submit Report
	Year 2: Beginning of Semester 1	Project Update	Submit Update
	Year 2: Beginning of Semester 2	Project Update	Submit Update
	Year 3: Beginning of third year	Project Update	Submit Update
	Year 4: August of fourth year	2-3 page final summary of project that includes a reflective evaluation of the project process	N/A
	Ongoing	Participate in program evaluation (written and/or focus group)	View Options
	By the end of fourth year	Select poster, presentation, paper, creative option or your own idea	View Options

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