Garnering Support for Advance Care Planning

Advance care planning for paediatric patients.

Medical and technological advances have increased survival rates and enhanced the quality of life for infants, children and youths with chronic life-threatening conditions. Advance care planning includes the process of discussing life-sustaining treatments and establishing long-term care goals. Paediatric health care practitioners have an ethical obligation to educate themselves about this aspe...

Advance care planning in primary care.

Video decision support tool for advance care planning in dementia: randomised controlled trial

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the effect of a video decision support tool on the preferences for future medical care in older people if they develop advanced dementia, and the stability of those preferences after six weeks. DESIGN Randomised controlled trial conducted between 1 September 2007 and 30 May 2008. Setting Four primary care clinics (two geriatric and two adult medicine) affiliated with thr...

Advance care planning and the older patient.

Making treatment decisions for older people is difficult, because of the complex interplay of their multiple co-morbidities, but also because of the fine balance of risks vs. benefit in any chosen management plan. This becomes even more difficult when they lose the capacity to tell us what they want, and often in such situations we have to rely on information from others in order to make decisi...

Autonomy, liberalism and advance care planning.

The justification for advance directives is grounded in the notion that they extend patient autonomy into future states of incompetency through patient participation in decision making about end-of-life care. Four objections challenge the necessity and sufficiency of individual autonomy, perceived to be a defining feature of liberal philosophical theory, as a basis of advance care planning. The...