Advance Care Planning

Unless people know what is important to somebody they will not be able to take their wishes into account in relation to their future care and management.

The Milton Keynes Joint Palliative Care Group have created a document, ‘Planning your care in Advance’ to help with advance care planning. The document provides a framework and allows all of a person’s plans, both practical and health-related, to be recorded in a single place. It supports the provision of quality, personalised, End of Life Care. Anna Kent, Neurological Conditions Clinic Specialist, was part of the team that worked on this document and has a lot of experience supporting people with MSA.

Advance care planning can be used to let others know about an individual’s preferred choices in all aspects of care. It should be a voluntary process by which a person with mental capacity is enabled to identify their wishes, to provide information in future when the person may be unable to make their wishes known. Having an advance care plan has been shown to reduce the level of stress, anxiety and depression that family members experience in their caring role and can help prevent future crises.

More information can be found and the document can be downloaded from the Willen Hospice website: https://www.willen-hospice.org.uk/patients-families/advance-care-plan/