National Healthcare Decisions Day is April 16th! On this day, all across the country, health care facilities, health care professionals, chaplains, the legal community, and others will be participating in a collective effort to highlight the importance of making advance health care decisions and to provide tools for decision-making..
Notwithstanding a much higher awareness on the part of individuals and institutions regarding the need for health care decisions planning, implementation by individuals and institutions of plans meeting the need are still rare. Less than fifty percent of the severely or terminally ill patients had an advance directive in their medical record, according to a study by the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (http://www.ahrq.gov/). In a 2003 article, “Advance Care Planning: Preferences for Care at the End of Life,” USAHRQ reported that only twelve percent of patients with an advance directive had received input from their physician in its development. Moreover, between sixty-five and seventy-six percent of physicians whose patients had an advance directive were not aware that it existed.
Even when the advanced directive exists, and the physician is aware of its existence, most physicians do not consult with their patients regarding end-of-life issues until treatments have been exhausted, at least according to researchers publishing a report in the journal Cancer, reported last month in this blog (click here). According to the researchers, most doctors don't talk about end-of-life issues with their cancer patients when those patients are feeling well. Nor do they talk about them until treatments have been exhausted. Those delays might mean patients are unable able to make truly informed choices early in their treatment.
