Advance Care Planning - Respecting Choices

Content of this video is Copyrighted.
Copyright © 2007, Gundersen Lutheran Medical Foundation, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Respecting Choices
An advance care planning system that works!

www.respectingchoices.org

For many organizations, the vision of advance care planning remains too narrowly focused on increasing the completion of documents, establishing an electronic storage system, or providing more consumer education. This narrow vision will not begin to address the planning needs for millions of Americans who desire to have a "good death."

How and where people die in the United States has changed greatly over the last 30 years due to dramatic developments in medical science and technology. The ways in which these innovations have been socially organized and financed have created a need to make choices about how, when, and where a person dies.

As life expectancy has increased, so too have the multiple complications associated with chronic illnesses in the last years of life. Often the patient is unable to participate in decision making when it may be most important. It has become essential that plans be made in advance to guide future decisions about efforts to prolong life. Yet, nothing in our past experience and culture has fully prepared us for these often complex and stressful choices.

Respecting Choices has developed the components of a systems approach that includes: 1) community engagement, 2) professional education, and 3) organization/ community standards of practice. Addressing only one of these components will leave gaps in a system, as many organizations and communities have discovered. Addressing all will have a clear impact on improving care at the end of life.

While many groups have developed advance directive materials or documents, Respecting Choices¨ has taken a more comprehensive, systematic approach. In this program, the focus is on developing a system of training, practices, and policies so that effective advance care planning and end-of-life decision making becomes the routine - the expected care - throughout a health organization or a community.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• advance
• care
• planning
• directive
• respecting
• choices
• health
• medicine
• ethics
• palliative
• living
• will
• hospice
• end
• of
• life

[Tootallspottery]

Great video...

[eprocks6054]

wow........