A past experience with his beloved, suffering wife, and a staunch belief to not go down the dementia rabbit-hole, led “Andrew” to join Final Exit Network. Read to find out why.
Read More
Despite your best intentions, don’t wait until “five minutes to midnight” to take care of your end-of-life plan.
“Sleep deprivation amplified every emotion and wore me down quickly,” she said. She was exhausted, angry, and felt guilty. She was “flying blind” to be the surrogate as Betty neared death – and she was a trained, experienced hospice RN. What does that say about your chance of being an effective surrogate?
As discussed in Part 2, the SPIKES framework is useful to explore the family’s understanding of their loved one’s illness and to share information about medical condition and prognosis. When the purpose of a family meeting is to discuss goals of care, it may be useful to “unpack” care goals using the REMAP framework.
Just as for any medical procedure, conducting a meeting with families of seriously ill patients requires training and practice. Practitioners must develop skills in structuring serious-illness conversations and responding with empathy in emotionally fraught situations.
Timely, well-conducted conversations about goals of care in serious illness are associated with improved outcomes, including care aligned with the ill person’s values, less unwanted (and often expensive) care, improved satisfaction with care, and fewer mental health consequences for patients and families.
Please welcome death and grief educator, author, and public speaker Gail Rubin, aka The Doyenne of Death, as a guest contributor to the blog.
Please join us in welcoming author, podcast host, and end-of-life educator, and atheist chaplain Terri Daniel as a guest contributor to the blog.
Say hello to Althea Halchuck, FEN’s new surrogate consultant.
Visitor Count:
