End-of-Life Choice, Palliative Care and Counseling

Posts Tagged ‘healthcare proxy’

Nov 16, 2012Dignity and End-of-Life Care

Winston-Salem Chronicle
November 15, 2012

Consider this situation: you are driving home in a rain storm; you lose control of your car and hit a tree. You are taken to the hospital and need emergency medical attention. After the surgery, they determine that there is no hope of recovery, and you can only be kept alive by machines. What happens to you now? Would you choose to be kept alive artificially, or would you prefer to die with dignity? Unless you make your wishes known beforehand, you will not have a say. Your family will decide your fate without knowing what you wanted done.

Unfortunately in our society today, very little planning is done for the certainty of death.  In the absence of documents stating someone’s preference regarding end-of-life issues, the person is vulnerable to the will of the physician, family, friends or other acquaintances. Alarmingly, only 11 percent of African Americans express their wishes regarding end-of-life care, compared to 38 percent of whites. More

Apr 16, 2012Easy New Format for Advance Directive

Arrives for National Healthcare Decisions Day on April 16th

Compassion & Choices, the nation’s oldest and largest nonprofit organization working to improve care and expand choice at the end of life, today announced a new resource to aid all Americans in advance care planning. In time for the fifth annual National Healthcare Decisions Day (NHDD), Compassion & Choices is offering free advance directive forms specific to every state, in an editable PDF format. The new format eases the completion of an advance directive, and Compassion & Choices offers additional tools to facilitate the process.

“We can’t control everything about our death. But if we communicate effectively, we make it more likely that our wishes for the end of life will be known and respected,” said Barbara Coombs Lee, president of Compassion & Choices. “Recent studies indicate the single most powerful thing a person can do to improve the chance for gentle dying is — simply and courageously — to talk about it.”

Compassion & Choices offers a Good-to-Go Toolkit and Good-To-Go Resource Guide to help define priorities, understand who to talk with and find ideas on how to get the conversation rolling. These planning tools and editable state-specific advance directive forms can be downloaded at CompassionAndChoices.org/G2G, free of charge.

Over a thousand organizations joined this year to promote NHDD, an initiative to encourage the majority of Americans who have not yet done so to complete advance directives.

For more information please visit www.compassionandchoices.org

Compassion & Choices is a nonprofit organization working to improve care and expand choice at the end of life. We support, educate and advocate.