My future wishes: Advance Care Planning for people with dementia

Beverley Marriott is an Advanced Nurse Practitioner working in the Birmingham community healthcare foundation trust. She is also a King’s College Older Person Fellow. She tweets @bevbighair

The “My future wishes: Advance Care Planning (ACP) for people with dementia in all care settings” document was recently published by NHS England, Dementia Team and End of Life Care Team.

Advance care planning (ACP) is a vital part of personalised care planning. This recently published document acts as a resource to support clinicians and practitioners who provide health and social care for people with dementia. It aims to ensure people living with dementia can develop an ACP through initiating conversations with their supporting clinicians and/or loved ones. It aims to offer a consistent standard of support for patients diagnosed with dementia using ACPs that are developed in partnership with patients and families.

Their death: their story

Katie Wells is a Senior Staff Nurse who has worked with older people for 20 years, and couldn’t think of a more satisfying specialty. Here she explains her work to highlight the benefits of Advance Care Planning, and how the death of her Nan made her want to change the role of ward-based nurses to help patients plan for the future.

With so many older people in their last years of life being admitted into acute hospitals, contact with hospital staff gives us a golden opportunity to develop good relationships with both patients and families. These relationships can allow us to make the time to initiate structured conversations surrounding the care and support patients wish to receive at their End of Life.

May issue of Age & Ageing now available

The May 2015 issue of Age and Ageing, the journal of the British Geriatrics Society is out now!

A full table of contents is available here, with editorials, research papers, reviews, short reports, case reports book reviews and more. Hot topics this issue include:

• Advance care planning
• Geriatrics outreach services to residential care
• Barriers to physical activity
• Benefits of walking programs
• Resident-resident physical aggression in care homes

The Editor’s View can be read here.

This issue’s free access papers are:

• Handgrip strength, ageing and mortality in rural Africa
• Distance to retail stores and risk of being homebound among older adults in a city severely affected by the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake
• A longitudinal cohort study evaluating the impact of a geriatrician-led residential care outreach service on acute healthcare utilisation