Advance Care Planning: A Better Way to Care and Prepare for End of Life

Course overview

Due to advances in life-sustaining health care and successful public health strategies, Americans are living longer than any time previously in history. While some older adults remain healthy and robust until very close to death, it is more likely that an older individual will have lived for two or more years with one or more chronic diseases and experienced substantial disability before dying. Across the lifespan, Americans are faced with a need to plan for health care services they consider essential to living well. Home health and hospice clinicians must have a better understanding of advance directives, hospice, and palliative care so that they can have crucial conversations with patients and their families on these subjects and facilitate effective advance care planning.