Can Your Doctor Understand Your Advance Directive? Terry Fulmer Writes on Next Avenue Blog
Terry Fulmer, PhD, RN, FAAN, President of The John A. Hartford Foundation, has written a blog for Next Avenue, "Can Your Doctor Understand Your Advance Directive?"
Dr. Fulmer notes that "health care is deeply personal - especially as we age and face serious illness." She talks about the development of advance directives - legal documents that explain how you want medical decisions to be made when you’re too ill to speak for yourself, and discusses a new resource from the American Bar Association (ABA) Commission on Law and Aging, "a toolkit with a simple goal: to help attorneys draft very clear advance directives for their clients that will be readily understood and used by clinicians."
"Having conversations and documenting our wishes means more of us will receive the kind of care we want — care that is in sync with our personal goals and values and care that means we can live better than ever before, even at the end of life."
To read the blog, click here.
The blog is part of Next Avenue's Special Report series, "Living to the End of Life."