National Advance Care Planning Week
A blog post written by Linda Nolte, Program Director, Advance Care Planning Australia
Life is full of moments when it's important to be open, to be ready, and to be heard. This is especially true when it's time to consider Advance Care Planning. However, not many people know about or get involved with advance care planning. This is why the initiative of National Advance Care Planning Week began.
Advance Care Planning Australia, for the first time is running, National Advance Care Planning Week.
National Advance Care Planning Week is running from 16 – 22 April 2018 and for the event we started with a simple, yet ambitious goal; let’s encourages all Australians to make their future health care preferences known. We wanted to challenge people – not just the elderly, but fit and healthy people - to start conversations with loved ones about what living well means to them and to consider who they would want to speak for them, if they were too sick to speak for themselves.
The process of advance care planning ensures your voice is heard if medical decisions have to be made for you. Having these conversations with your medical treatment decision maker and documenting your values and preferences in an Advance Care Directive, takes the guess work out any decision making process.
However, starting the conversation can be hard, so to help we have gathered a series of resources you can use to plan for tomorrow so you can live for today;
- Conversation Starters
- Ted Talks
- Reading list
- Games and activities
- Stories
We also put the call out to our networks and stakeholders to support the initiative and get involved. We have been astounded with the response.
Here’s what has been achieved so far:
- 106+ community events to support the initiative and raise awareness
- Events held in every Australian state and territory
- Participation of our Ambassadors, representing leading clinicians, researchers, media identities and peak body and policy leaders, Australia-wide
- Support and interest from stakeholders including government, community and health organisations, peak bodies, PHNs and more.
You can find out more about National Advance Care Planning Week and advance care planning by visiting https://www.advancecareplanning.org.au/advance-care-planning-week.
Linda Nolte, Program Director, Advance Care Planning Australia