Planning for Long-term Health Care - Essay on Public Health

In the United States, the health professionals, patient advocacy groups as well as the policy makers have promoted the means of advance care planning, which includes the arrangement for the forthcoming medical care, at a time when the person is not able to make the personal decision at the end of life. With the advance care planning, individuals are able people with fatal or chronicle illnesses to deliver preferences to lead decisions when they are unable to speak for themselves. Although, most of the people do not take part in advance care planning decisions, which associates with the documentations like the living will. The key reason for such reasoning is because they disregard advance care planning as adequately crucial (Administration on Aging, 2011).

However, there are reasonable values for advance care planning for at least one set of people. Unlike people who are ailing from other adulthood chronicle illnesses, dementia patients undergo a stage whereby they are able to take part in decision making trailed by quite a lot of years whereby, they cant formulate their decisions, hence depending on others, like family members, who do the decision making on their behalf. Such decision might include problematic end-of-life choices, though, for numerous years prior to death they will also comprise daily decision regarding their care together with daily living (Brugha, et al, 1993).

The focal manner to maintain patient autonomy and attain the patient-centered care is by eliciting their health care values together with their predilections prior to their loss of the capacity to indicate those preferences. In the early stages of dementia, the patient has a reasonable grace period to discuss with the family members regarding the values and goals that need to inform a range of future decisions. Families will be left in the dilemma if they have no chance for the discussion, they will be stressed in making decisions on nursing home location plus end-of-life care with the absence of the patients' preferences. The predominance of this decision could possibly elevate by the year 2050 when the prevalence of dementia in the US is projected to hit between 11 to 16 million (Byrne, 1997).

Even though advance care planning is appropriate for the dementia patients as well as the members of their families, a bit is realized concerning the approaches that could provide advance care planning discussion or concern the motives for people not having such discussions. Appreciating these approaches and reasons is important to development advance care planning.

References

Administration on Aging (2011). Facts: Aging and Disability Resource Center. http://aoa.gov/AoARoot/Press_Room/Products_Materials/fact/pdfADRC.pdf

Brugha, T. S., Wing, J. K., Brewin, C. R., et al (1993) The relationship of social network deficits with deficits in social functioning in long-term psychiatric disorders. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, 28, 218224.

Byrne, P. (1997) Psychiatric stigma: the past, passing and to come. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 90, 618620.