What is Advance Care Planning?
Advance care planning (ACP) is a voluntary process that provides people the opportunity to consider and discuss their preferences for future health care before a crisis occurs. Advance care planning is an important process, particularly for individuals with a life-limiting illness or those with increasing frailty and disease burden.
Australia’s inaugural ACP week runs from 16-22 April, 2018. This week provides the opportunity to participate in advance care planning and discuss our wishes, values and preferences with our loved ones, decision makers and doctors. The week encourages health professionals to involve individuals and their decision makers to discuss and, where appropriate, document their preferences in an Advance Health Directive, Enduring Power of Attorney and/or Statement of Choices document.
How does a document get added to a health record?
The Office of Advance Care Planning is a free statewide service that receives and reviews completed ACP documents prior to upload to a Queensland Health medical record, The Viewer, where documents can be easily accessed by clinicians when required. The Viewer is accessible to public hospital clinical staff, General Practitioners who have registered for access and Queensland Ambulance Service staff. In addition, of course, individuals can directly upload their own ACP documents to My Health Record.
For details of local ACP contacts, to send ACP documents for upload, or for further information about ACP in Queensland, please contact the Office via email acp@health.qld.gov.au
Where can I Access Advance Care Planning resources?
There are a range of ACP resources that are available to support both individuals and health providers. If you are an individual who would like to look at ACP you can view the individual fact sheet here. If you are a decision maker for someone else you can view the decision maker fact sheet here.
As a GP you can access accredited training on the topic of ACP via Think GP. You can also download the latest factsheets for health providers and GPs here.