Advance Care Planning
Iowa City Hospice and the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization encourage people to plan for the end-of-life care they would want and to share their wishes with family and healthcare providers.
There are many steps individuals can take:
- Complete an advance directive, also known as a living will.
- Talk about your wishes with family, friends, and healthcare professionals.
- The end of a life is never easy. We can take steps to make sure our wishes are honored and that our families receive support they need.
- The conversations we have with each other about end-of-life decisions are important questions each of us should answer, regardless of age.
- Talk now, before a crisis, to ensure that family conflict or uncertainty about end-of-life treatment decisions don’t make a difficult situation even more complicated.
Iowa City Hospice has end-of-life resources available, including:
- Brochures and other information to help people learn about advance care planning and about hospice as an end-of-life care option
- Speakers available to talk to churches and other groups
- Staff to talk with people about end-of-life care concerns
- Iowa City Hospice staff who can come to doctors’ offices to assist medical professionals in starting a conversation with a patient or family member about hospice care
Click here for more information about end-of-life care.
Article of Interest
LETTING GO by Atul Gawande (The New Yorker, August 23, 2010)
What should medicine do when it can't save your life? Modern medicine is good at staving off death with aggressive interventions—and bad at knowing when to focus, instead, on improving the days that terminal patients have left. Read more...