Nursing Home: Advance Care Planning

Are you finding it difficult to provide good care to your elderly loved ones? Advance Care Planning has solved this for you.

Choosing between caring for elderly members of family and work is a tough challenge that the working class is facing. Working millennials are finding it unmanageable to keep up with the caregiving responsibilities of the family’s senior members. Worry not, as with the help of advanced care planning, your aging members’ caregiving responsibilities will be fully addressed.

Advance care planning (ACP) enables people to plan their health care in the future. It directs healthcare professionals to serve the medical needs of an individual when he/she is not in a position to make their own healthcare choices. (Source: Wikipedia)

This ensures that the recipient gets the optimum medical care they want when they lose the capacity to do so. It involves the discussions between healthcare professionals and patients and sometimes their trusted family members/friends regarding their future care. It helps in facilitating comprehensive care in a family-centred approach.

Besides help in making health care decisions, ACP also provides high-quality care and more effective utilisation of healthcare services. As per research, advanced care planning improves the quality of care and patient outcomes.

What are the Main Components of ACP?

A meaningful ACP is a model of patient-centred care, and it requires:

• Understanding, reflecting, and discussing the person’s health condition and ways to care in the context of his or her medical preferences.
• Analysing, formulating, and documenting a strategy to proceed with caregiving.
• Communicating and discussing the strategy with the family members and the medical team.
• Reviewing the strategy timely, ensuring its consistency with values and goals, especially with health conditions changes.
• Executing the strategy under the appropriate circumstances.

What are the benefits of ACP for patients, their families, healthcare professionals, and the complete system?

Healthcare professionals are enabled to conduct structured, meaningful conversations with patients about their needs and preferences regarding treatment. The location of treatments is also catered. It offers patient-centred care by focusing on their personal preferences for their care and treatments. It also ensures the consistency of the care that the patient is receiving.

ACP understands the need for medical care when the patient lacks decision-making capacity. In this way, it reduces the burden of making decisions. It increases the probability that patients with life-limiting illnesses can die in their preferred place, such as their home. It improves families’ bereavement experience by reducing stress, anxiety, and depression after a loved one’s death.

It enhances families’ satisfaction with end-of-life care and understanding of what to expect during a loved one’s dying process. It helps in reducing moral distress among critical care nurses. It positively impacts the quality of life and end-of-life care by preventing unwanted hospitalisations and increasing the utilisation of palliative and hospice services. It diminishes the use of aggressive or intensive treatments at the end of life and reduces the number and/or length of hospital admissions.

It decreases in-hospital and intensive care unit deaths. It also reduces the cost of end-of-life care without increasing mortality. It promotes higher completion rates of advance directives. It boosts the effectiveness of meeting patients’ end-of-life wishes over written documents alone. It improves care for individuals with dementia by enabling them to express their care decisions before cognitive function worsens to the point they are incapable of making their own medical choices. It also improves outcomes and patient experience while reducing health-related costs for high-risk, high-needs patients.

ACP allows healthcare professionals and caregivers to proactively arrange for patients boarding at home, in a nursing home, or in a housing association facility rather than going to a hospital. For this, various advanced housing associations software are also developed. It is a software solution that offers everything you need to manage your elderly loved ones’ care efficiently. This program has the ability to deliver all aspects of the day-to-day management requirements of housing associations.

Housing Associations can be completely customised to meet your loved ones’ specific needs without any issues of high costs that come with the majority of ready-made housing associations software solutions. Find a hassle-free housing association software solution for better care of the senior members of your family.