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Objectives The COVID-19 pandemic prompted planning for clinical surges and associated resource shortages, particularly of equipment such as ventilators. We sought to examine the experience of the healthcare professionals who created policies for crisis standards of care, and allocation of ventilators in the event of shortage.Design To that end, we conducted semistructured interviews with healthcare professionals in the USA involved in institutional planning for resource shortages in the setting of the COVID-19 pandemic.Setting USA.Participants We conducted 25 interviews between May and July 2021. Half of the respondents were female (48%), many from Northeastern institutions (52%), and most practised in academic institutions (92%).Results Many (64%) respondents reported that their institution had an approved policy to guide ventilator allocation in the event of a shortage. We identified one overarching theme: the work of planning for resource shortages imposed a psychological burden on many planners. We identified four subthemes that influenced that burden: impact of leadership, institutional variation in process and policies, faith in the policies and future directions.Conclusions Improved leadership strategies and cross-institutional collaboration can reduce the psychological burden of planning and facilitate updating plans in anticipation of future shortages.

Introduction Fewer than half of all people in the USA have a documented advance care plan (ACP). Hospitalisation offers an opportunity for physicians to initiate ACP conversations. Despite expert recommendations, hospital-based physicians (hospitalists) do not routinely engage in these conversations, reserving them for the critically ill.The objective of this study is to test the effect of a novel behavioural intervention on the incidence of ACP conversations by hospitalists practicing at a stratified random sample of hospitals drawn from 220 US acute care hospitals staffed by a large, nationwide acute care physician practice with an ongoing ACP quality improvement initiative.Methods and analysis We developed Hopewell Hospitalist, a theory-based adventure video game, to modify physicians' attitudes towards ACP conversations and to increase their motivation for engaging in them. The planned study is a pragmatic stepped-wedge crossover phase III trial, testing the efficacy of Hopewell Hospitalist for increasing ACP conversations. We will randomise 40 hospitals to the month (step) in which they receive the intervention. We aim to recruit 30 hospitalists from up to eight hospitals each step to complete the intervention, playing Hopewell Hospitalist for at least 2 hours. The primary outcome is ACP billing for patients aged 65 and older managed by participating hospitalists. We hypothesise that the intervention will increase ACP billing in the quarter after dissemination, and have 80% power to detect a 1% absolute increase and 99% power to detect a 3.5% absolute increase.Ethics and dissemination Dartmouth’s Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects has approved the study protocol, which is registered on clinicaltrials.gov. We will disseminate the results through manuscripts and the trials website. Hopewell Hospitalist will be made available on the iOS Application Store for download, free of cost, at the conclusion of the trial.Trial registration number NCT04557930.