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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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Using the family covenant in planning end-of-life care
— obligations and promises of patients, families and physicians | | Author(s) | David J Doukas, John Hardwig |
| Journal title | Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, vol 51, no 8, August 2003 |
| Pages | pp 1155-1158 |
| Keywords | Medical care ; Terminal care ; Wills [legal services] ; Patients ; Rights [elderly] ; Attitude ; The Family ; Doctors ; Social ethics. |
| Annotation | The current use of advance directives (living wills) is failing to respect patient autonomy; and doctors and families need to interact more meaningfully to clarify the values and preferences at stake in advance care planning. This paper proposes using the family covenant as a preventive ethics process designed to improve end-of-life planning. The family covenant formulates advance directives in conversation with family members and with the assistance of a physician, thereby making advance directives more acceptable to the family and more intelligible to other physicians. It adds the moral force of a promise to the obligation of respecting a patient's preferences about end-of-life care. These negotiations between patient, family and doctor, from early planning phases through implementation, should greatly reduce the incidence of family disagreements as to what the patient would have wanted. Thus, the family covenant ensures that advance directive discussions within the family promotes and respects the autonomy of other family members, and might even spur others in the family to complete advance directives through additional covenants. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-030923209 A |
| Classmark | LK: LV: JV:VTH: LF: IKR: DP: SJ: QT2: TQ |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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