Advance Care Planning: Communicating about Matters of Life and Death - Tapa blanda

While advance directives hold a great deal of promise for ensuring self-determination and quality of life near its end, the majority of Americans face life-threatening illness without having completed effective advance care planning.. This volume recounts the history of advance directives, chronicling the evolution of an approach that initially focused on completing forms, to one that now emphasizes more comprehensive strategies for facilitating conversations about end-of-life care and planning for dying and death. It provides helpful strategies for initiating and guiding discussions among providers, patients, and their loved ones, easing the burdens of uncertainty, and improving the efficacy of surrogate decision making near the end of life.

Scholars and practitioners from a variety of disciplines provide a well-rounded view of the history and challenges of advance directives. Authors include palliative care physicians, nurses, social workers, grief counselors, educators, lawyers, psychologists, sociologists, and medical ethicists. The book shares successful strategies on how effective advance care planning can provide smoother transitions at the end of life and ensure better quality of living before death. It incorporates effective multidisciplinary, relationship-based models of advance care planning along with multidisciplinary perspectives to help caregiving professionals initiate conversations and disseminate relevant information to patients and their loved ones and advocates. Case studies illustrate the importance of, challenges with, and prospects for advance directives and advance care planning. The book addresses common barriers to advance care planning and offers ways to overcome them, as well as detailing public health, legal, and comprehensive community planning approaches to change how our current American society deals with dying, death, and end-of-life care.

Key Features:

• Introduces a multidisciplinary, pragmatic approach to advance care planning
• Addresses strategies to reform advance care planning
• Presents case studies illustrating the importance, benefits, and challenges of advance directives
• Features successful initiatives in advance care planning and new directions that shift community practice related to dying, death, and end-of-life care.
• Includes the contributions of physicians, grief counselors, medical ethicists, social workers, psychologists, medical ethicists, lawyers, nurses, educators, and others

Leah Rogne, PhD, is Professor of Sociology at Minnesota State University, Mankato, USA. She teaches Sociology of Death, Applied Sociology, Program Planning, and Nursing Home Administration; and supervises internships for Gerontology and Sociology. Dr. Rogne directs Mankato's Applied Sociology Program and has served as Acting Director of its Gerontology Program. She worked as a social worker and programme developer in long-term care for 10 years. Her research is on long-term peace activists, culture change in long-term care, and social insurance and the privatisation debate. Rogne was co-editor of Social Insurance and Social Justice: Social Security, Medicare, and the Campaign against Entitlements (2009), co-author of an Occasional Paper on Teaching Social Insurance published by AARP in 2008, and organiser of multiple professional presentations on social insurance and the privatisation debate. She is a member of the Palliative Care Consortium organised by Mayo Health Health Systems (Western Region), which is working on transforming how the Greater Mankato community in southern Minnesota does end-of-life care. Susana McCune, MA, CT, is a Certified Thanatologist, Behavioural Therapist, and a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at Antioch University, Seattle. Her doctoral studies include a concentration in Health Psychology with a specialisation in end-of-life care. She has presented at the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization Annual Clinical Conference; trained hospice nurses, social workers, and volunteers; and also trains psychologists, chaplains, and spiritual caregivers to provide care during end of life, at death, and through bereavement. She serves on the Washington State Psychological Association End-of-Life Special Interest Group.