What is Advance Care Planning?

Advance Care Planning (ACP) is a personalised process that emphasises reflection, choice and communication and gives people the chance to think about and write down what is important to them.  A person must have mental capacity* to make an advance care plan, and might find it helpful to talk to professionals about their care options (* for more information please visit Gov.uk ). As part of the process a person might choose to describe the type of care they would like at the end of their life.

Such personalised care plans can be documented in a person’s electronic record by way of Electronic Palliative Care Coordination Systems (EPaCCS), which should avoid a person having to repeat relevant information to the healthcare professionals involved in their care.   ACPs can be adapted at any time following further discussions.

What are we doing to support professionals and patients with ACP?

There are several tools and training programmes that the Network recommends that support our colleagues to undertake advance care planning.   These include:

• Mayfly Education Programme on Advance Care Planning and Communication skills.
• Guidance in Anticipatory Clinical Management Planning, including DNACPR.
• North West Model for Life Limiting Conditions; best practice guide for professionals.
• EARLY toolkit; for use in the Primary Care setting to aid earlier identification of patients who may be approaching end of life.
• ICARE & Share; personalised care planning Phase 1 for use in primary and community care settings with planned Phase 2 for secondary care (to be determined)
• SHADOW and Six Steps; for our Care Home colleagues
• Remote ACP guidance; a guide to help support planning when undertaken remotely (i.e. not face to face). Remote ACP Webinar 
• NHS England’s Universal Principles for Advance Care Planning

 For the public

There are several resources that can help with advance care planning, which can be found here.

People’s Voice is a group of lay people who have lived experience of, or an interest in, palliative and end of life care.  If you would like to know more about People’s Voice please visit here.