The Heart of Living and Dying: Upstreaming Advance Care Planning into Community Conversations in the Public Domain in Northern Ireland.

The Heart of Living and Dying: Upstreaming Advance Care Planning into Community Conversations in the Public Domain in Northern Ireland. J Soc Work End Life Palliat Care. 2020 Dec 11;:1-18 Authors: Mc Kenna D, O'Shea J, Tanner L Abstract This paper provides an evaluation of the Heart of Living and Dying (HLD) Initiative. This initiative is a group process that attempts to bring Advance Care Planning (ACP) into the public domain. It encourages participants to consider what matters to them in their living along with their hopes, preferences, and wishes for their final years and end-of-life care. An inductive, interpretive, and naturalistic approach allowed the researcher to study these phenomena in their natural setting i.e., the community. This qualitative study used 5 focus groups with 17 people and employed thematic data analysis to identify key themes. All participants in the HLD speak from a personal perspective irrespective of any professional background. It transpired that 16 respondents worked in health and social care, which subsequently became noteworthy in the findings. Three key themes were identified: (a) feeling emotionally safe enough to have such sensitive conversations is vital; (b) participating in the HLD process increases the confidence of those participants who worked in health and social care, to undertake ACP conversations and (c) planning ahead is a complex, staged process rather than a single record-making event...
Source: Journal of Social Work in End-of-Life and Palliative Care - Category: Palliative Care Tags: J Soc Work End Life Palliat Care Source Type: research