As a leading home health care service in Monterey CA, CCVNA is proud to offer external advance care planning. With professional assistance, you can make important decisions about your future care while you still have the cognitive strength to do so. This might sound like a painful process, but it brings significant advantages for yourself and your loved ones.
What Is Advance Care Planning?
Advance care planning is the process of deciding and writing down how future care decisions will be made. Healthcare professionals can talk you through the details of the plan and help you make important choices ahead of time. You can decide the types of treatments you’ll want and which you’d rather avoid, all according to your preferences and values. In the case that you’re unable to speak for yourself in the future, the plans you’ve made will be used to determine the details of your care.
What Does Advance Care Planning Include?
The first step in advance care planning is to discuss the potential treatment options that could come in the future. The goal is for all patients to make informed decisions. As you learn about life-sustaining treatments, you can decide how the various options align with your preferences.
Once you’ve learned the details, you’ll work with a professional to form a concrete plan. You’ll appoint a decision-maker to speak on your behalf if you’re no longer able to speak for yourself. You’ll also complete a set of advance directives stipulating the types of care you want and which you don’t. Having everything written and codified according to California law will ensure your end-of-life care corresponds to your desires.
The Benefits of Advance Care Planning
Advance care planning is a challenging process, but it has serious benefits. Leaving things to chance will only increase the stress and pain of illness. There’s a reason countless California residents have used advance directives to spell out their preferences. If you take the time to make a definitive plan, you’ll prepare yourself and your family for a more graceful aging process.
Reduces Pressure on Everyone Involved
Making your own healthcare decisions is stressful enough. Making those decisions on someone else’s behalf is even more challenging. If you enter your later years without an advance plan, you risk unleashing chaos on your loved ones. People could agonize over painful decisions, then go on to regret the choices they made for the rest of their lives. When you spell out your preferences ahead of time, you save people from having to make these decisions on your behalf. As a result, everyone will be able to grieve from a position of strength and love, not doubt and guilt.
Ensures Care Reflects Your Preferences
Most people value the control they exercise over their lives. There may come a point when you’re no longer able to make your own decisions or communicate your desires to others. If you haven’t made plans ahead of time, then other people in your life could make decisions you don’t approve of. Since the mechanisms exist to avoid this catastrophe, there’s no reason not to take advantage of them.
Decreases the Length of Hospital Stays
Patients can spend weeks or months in hospitals that they’d rather not be in just because they failed to communicate their preferences ahead of time. When you’ve already created a plan in advance, healthcare providers will know to send you home if that’s what you prefer. This will help you spend your last days in comfortable surroundings rather than the clinical environment of a hospital.
Makes It More Likely You can Die at Home
Many Californians would prefer to die at home. If you fall into that category, then you should make your preference clear ahead of time. Advance care planning gives you a standardized way to stipulate future procedures. If you don’t say something before it’s too late, you could end up dying in an environment where you don’t feel totally comfortable. You’re much better off speaking up now while you have the chance.
Allows You to Take Advantage of Your Current Wellness
Advance care planning gives the present, healthy version of you a chance to speak for the future version of you who might be silenced by illness. Wellness is a blessing, and it allows you to plot out your future. If you have the strength to discuss difficult topics and make hard decisions now, you should take advantage of it.
Reduces Healthcare Costs
When you haven’t made healthcare decisions ahead of time, you might end up in situations that are needlessly costly. If you’d rather be home than at a hospital, you might as well say so now. That way, you won’t have to pay for a hospital stay that you’d rather be avoiding anyway.
Improves the Overall Patient Experience
Getting sick is rough, and navigating the healthcare system is no fun, either. Advance care planning is one way to make the process a little more bearable. When you’ve written down your preferences, healthcare providers will know exactly how to handle your case. This will result in a patient experience that’s generally more attuned to your values and ideals.
Advance Care Planning: The Right Choice for Your Future
With something important as your future healthcare, there’s no sense leaving anything to chance. Advance care planning gives your loved ones and your healthcare providers a blueprint for your future care. As a result, everyone involved will have an easier time dealing with the challenges of aging and illness.