Advance Care Plan
Advance care planning is a process of thinking and talking about your values and goals and what your preferences are for your current and future health care. Advance care planning is for people who are well, people who are unwell, and people in their last days of life.
An advance care plan helps you to write down your advance care planning wishes. It contains information 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 communicate these yourself. This includes consent for care you would like, and your refusal of treatments you would not like, to receive.
My advance care plan and guide is a national template that has been developed, by Tō tātou Reo advance care planning, especially for New Zealanders, so they can share their advance care planning preferences with their family, friends and healthcare team. For more information about advance care plans, visit the advance care planning website…
Discuss your plan with your support network
It can be a good idea to discuss your advance care planning thoughts 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 health care teams to know your wishes, especially if you are not able to tell them yourself. This creates peace of mind for you and your loved ones.
The my advance care plan and guide template walks you through everything you need to know, and think about, to make the process of recording and sharing your plan easier.
Contact your local advance care planning team to find out about attending community advance care planning sessions to help facilitate important discussions around your future health care and read stories about other Kiwi’s advance care planning journeys.
What does an advance 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 advance care plan added to your medical record – for your family doctor (GP) and healthcare providers to access, contact your local Health New Zealand advance care planning team. Each district has a different process for storing and sharing advance care plans.
Keeping your advance care plan up-to-date
It can be helpful to review your advance 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.
Think about what gives your life meaning and how you would like to spend your final days.
