Future planning: Advance Care Planning Reconsidered - January 25th, 2024

This one day conference shines a new and different light on a process of future planning within healthcare, known as Advance Care Planning (ACP).

It has often been made available for people facing a life-changing/life threatening diagnosis and is considered to be an essential method for preventing over-treatment and suffering.

It is commonly initiated, then enacted by health professionals who want the opportunity to plan for future treatments, ceilings and place of care in the event of physical deterioration of the person’s condition.

Drawing on a variety of experiences and perspectives we pose questions and seek new insights regarding ACP, its successes and its failures.

Does it work for all? Which concepts and assumptions underlie its practice? What must we give greater consideration to in the future? Who else needs to be involved and when?

We welcome advocates of lived experience, professionals, policy makers and anyone else concerned to support an inclusive and supportive approach to future planning. Come ready to share your ideas and aspirations to create a new and different way forward.

This event will be of interest to:

Clinicians working in primary and secondary care
Hospice and hospital-based clinicians
Care home staff
Policy makers
Commissioner

What to expect:

In this conference in partnership with people working across the death system we will consider how ACP has been implemented and what kinds of outcomes and impact it may have had, as well as where we may need to look more closely at its application in practice and the impact on equitable treatment. We will engage with some of the debates or considerations around the implementation of ACP and who may engage in it, and what happens when they do.

The conference will help people understand some of the underlying assumptions around ACP and which concepts they are rooted in (improving experience through choice, personalised care), and also contextualise ACP by reviewing how people might understand or resist it.

Importantly, we will consider whether planning for the future is a shared goal and if so what roles other stakeholders in wider society have. We’ll ask how the health system might improve its response and where ACP might sit in a continuum of actions, understanding, timing, and more so that all stakeholders benefit. Our intention is to create an event in which there is wide participation on the part of all attending to negotiate and arrive at some key recommendations to amend and improve the current process.