Planning ahead with dementia: what role can advance care planning play? A review on opportunities and challenges.

Planning ahead with dementia: what role can advance care planning play? A review on opportunities and challenges. Swiss Med Wkly. 2018 Dec 17;148:w14706 Authors: Bosisio F, Jox RJ, Jones L, Rubli Truchard E Abstract Advance directives emerged in the 1960s with the goal of empowering people to exert control over their future medical decisions. However, it has become apparent, over recent years, that advance directives do not sufficiently capture the temporal and relational aspects of planning treatment and care. Advance care planning (ACP) has been suggested as a way to emphasise communication between the patient, their surrogate decision maker and healthcare professional(s) in order to anticipate healthcare decisions in the event that the patient loses decision-making capacity, either temporarily or permanently. In more and more countries, ACP has become common practice in planning the treatment of terminal diseases such as cancer or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. However, even though neurodegenerative dementia results in the gradual loss of decision-making capacity, ACP is still extremely rare. There are several reasons for this. Firstly, some people have difficulties talking about illness and death, especially when this involves anticipation. Secondly, lay people and professionals alike struggle to consider Alzheimer’s disease and similar forms of dementia as terminal diseases. Thirdly, although patient decision-making ca...
Source: Swiss Medical Weekly - Category: General Medicine Authors: Tags: Swiss Med Wkly Source Type: research