How does advance care planning work?

Advance Care Planning assists you, your doctors and other people involved with your care, to think and talk about your medical options.

Advance care planning is useful if you have an illness and want to make decisions about specific treatments, but it can also be used by healthy people who want to make a more general statement about the sort of medical treatments they would like, or might refuse.

Advance care planning allows you to make a plan that takes into account both what is important to you and what the doctors think is possible and reasonable.

The final step is making sure that your plan is available to anyone who might be caring for you in the future, so they know what you do and don’t want.

Advance care planning works best when you:

TALK to your Doctor(s) about any illness that you have and about your treatment options
TALK with your family/friends about what is important to you and about your choices.
CHOOSE someone who can make decisions for you if you cannot
TELL this person, your family and your doctor about your wishes for future medical treatments
WRITE down your wishes so that these people have something to refer to in the future.

Read Bob's story - Bob, an 85 year old man, was found collapsed...

after suffering a severe stroke. The doctors told the family he would not be able to walk, talk or eat again and that if he survived he would almost certainly need to go into a nursing home to be looked after. He was getting worse and decisions needed to be made by the doctors about what to do. His niece Jean, who visited Bob regularly since his wife had died, was confident that Bob would not want to have further treatment and would like to be allowed to die naturally. Although they had not spoken about this exactly, Bob had talked about a similar situation happening to one of his friends and had said that if he could not look after himself and feed himself he wouldn’t want to “go on”. Bob’s son John flew in from another city. Bob and John had always had a difficult relationship and hardly ever talked. When the doctors asked the family whether Bob should have an artificial feeding tube inserted into his stomach Jean and Robert disagreed completely. In the absence of an Advance Care Plan or any legally appointed Substitute Decision Maker the doctors felt obliged to do as Robert requested because he was automatically given the decision making responsibility. Bob was sent to a nursing home with a feeding tube in place.

If you tell your family what you want and choose someone to make decisions on your behalf, then your doctors will be able to hear your point of view and you will not in all likelihood receive treatment you would not have wanted.