Advance care planning is about more than just planning your death; it’s about understanding how you want to live your life. It’s often a deeply personal experience that involves reflecting on what is important and meaningful to you and sharing your desires, values and beliefs with those around you so that they are aware of …
When I attended the Association of Health Care Journalists (AHCJ) conference in Boston recently, discussion swirled on the topics of unsustainable costs of care, doctors’ incentives under traditional payment models to order more tests and treatments, and the struggles of patients’ family members to avoid unwanted care at the end of life. That Sunday night, I was back at …
Every patient, young and old, who enters the hospital where I work needs to have a discussion with their physician about how far the medical team should go in attempting to revive them in the event that they stop breathing or their heart stops pumping. The results of this discussion are known as their ‘code …
Advance care planning is an important process by which people think about how they would like to be cared for if they are seriously ill. While most Canadians agree that having conversations about advance care planning are important, fewer than half actually do. In some jurisdictions, advance care planning is done much better than it …
Thirty percent of an individual’s Medicare expenditures in the United States are spent in the last year of life, numbers that are very similar to here in Canada. This, in my opinion, represents a fundamental flaw in our medical economic system and culture. As a soon to be critical care fellow at McMaster University this …