Easing the burden: An end-of-life decision tool to help patients

Talking about and planning for end-of-life care can be difficult for patients and their families. Often these conversations occur too late or even not at all. Recently, Stanford University Department of Medicine developed a project that empowers patients to take the initiative to talk to their physician about what matters most to them at the end of their lives. Without end-of life decisions on file, a patient’s care decisions may be made by family members and the care team and not reflect what the patient actually wants. A new module from the AMA’s STEPS Forward™ collection of practice improvement initiatives can help physicians facilitate a conversation with a patient about end-of-life decisions before an emergency situation arises and those desires are left unknown. Stanford, which contributed this STEPS Forward module after winning the AMA-MGMA Practice Innovation Challenge, conducted research and enlisted the help of multi-ethnic, multi-lingual patients and their families to create a letter template that guides patients through the process of making important advanced planning decisions they might otherwise have put off. The Letter Project The template, called “the Letter Project,” allows patients to talk about what matters to them most on a personal level unrelated to medical care. Patients also use the template to document how they like to handle bad news, describe their medical decision preferences, give input on the treatment interventions they want ...
Source: AMA Wire - Category: Journals (General) Authors: Source Type: news