Advance care planning: Whose agenda is it anyway?

PALLIATIVE MEDICINE, 2014;28(8):997-999. One of the challenges we face in end-of-life care today is juggling the multiple agendas within advance care planning [ACP]. Whose agenda is it anyway? Patients, families, health-care professionals, commissioners of care, legislative frameworks or society as a whole? How do we support adults with a life-shortening illness to live with, prepare and plan for dying in an individual way without focussing only on planning for incapacity, treatment decisions or fitting them into a preconceived and possibly inflexible system of how a good death should be. How do we bring together the multiple agendas allowing equal weight to both the process and outcomes? ACP has to be more than a “tick box policy driven formulaic response…” read more

An article from Media Watch, compiled and annotated by Barry R. Ashpole (Ontario, Canada). More reports can be found at IPCRC.NET