Advanced Care Plan

An Advanced Care Plan helps you to plan the health care you want in the future. It contains decisions about your personal, cultural and spiritual values, and your instructions and wishes for health treatment and end of life care to be followed if you are unable to tell family and carers what you want. This includes consent for care you would like, and your refusal of treatments you would not like, to receive. It can be very helpful if both you and your loved ones have completed these while you are still healthy and well.

The New Zealand Health Quality and Safety Commission (HQSC) has designed a detailed advanced care plan template, especially for New Zealanders, that will help you get started on your advanced care plan. They also have a website dedicated to helping people understand the importance of an advanced care plan.

Discuss your plan with your support network

It can be a good idea to discuss advance care plans with family, friends, doctors and specialists to help make informed decisions. Once you know what you want, writing your wishes down will make it easier for family and carers to know what decisions to make, especially if you can’t speak for yourself. This creates peace of mind for you and your loved ones. The HQSC Advanced Care Plan template walks you through everything you need to know, and think about, to make the process of recording and sharing your plan easier.

Ask your District Health Board (DHB) about attending a community Advance Care Planning Workshop to help facilitate important discussions around your future health care and read stories about other kiwi’s ACP journeys.

What does an advanced care plan include?

What is important to you and what gives your life meaning. This might be cultural or religious beliefs or personal beliefs such as what suffering means to you.
Specific concerns or fears you have about your future and getting older
How you like to make decisions and what it would look like to have someone else make decisions for you
Any treatments or types of care that you would or wouldn’t want
Who you would want to make decisions on your behalf if you weren’t able to
If there was a choice, how and where you would like to spend your last days

Sharing and storing your plan

Once you have written down what is important to you and what you want to happen, it is important to share your plan with friends and family and let them know where you keep your most recent copy. It can be a good idea to choose a time to review your plan each year, perhaps around your birthday or another significant date. If you have an Enduring Power of Attorney, it is important for them to also know about your plan and have a copy.

To establish your plan as an official document, you need to discuss it with a healthcare professional and include their contact details and signature on your plan. Doing this confirms that you were competent at the time you created your plan, that you discussed care choices you might face, that you based your plan on adequate information and that your plan was made voluntarily.

To get your advanced care plan attached to your medical records for your family doctor (GP) and healthcare providers to access, you need to contact the District Health Board (DHB) in your area. Each region in New Zealand has a different process for this.

Keeping your advanced care plan up-to-date

It can be helpful to review your advanced care plan regularly as your thoughts around treatment may change if you have changes in your situation. You may also decide to share with someone new. A good idea is to choose an annual review date, perhaps on your birthday or on another significant date.