Death, Taxes and Advance Directives

Death, taxes and advance directives.

Suboptimal care at the end-of-life can be due to lack of access or knowledge of patient wishes. Ambiguity is often the result of non-standardized formats. Borrowing digital technology from other industries and using existing health information infrastructure can greatly improve the completion, storage, and distribution of advance directives. We believe several simple, low-cost adaptations to re...

African Cultural Concept of Death and the Idea of Advance Care Directives

An advance care directive is a person's oral or written instructions about his or her future medical care, if he or she becomes unable to communicate. It may be in written or oral form. Africans ordinarily do not encourage the contemplation of death or any discussion about their own or their loved ones' death. According to the African belief system, life does not end with death, but continues i...

Advance Directives in the Context of Uncertain Prognosis for Residents of Nursing Homes

This report documents the findings of a mixed-methods study focused on the advanced directives of 182 residents of three LTC facilities in southern Ontario, Canada. Although almost all had a completed advance directive within 3 months of death, most did not have a palliative designation or directive until a few days before they died. Each facility’s written Progress Notes revealed staff members...

[Death, dignity and advance directives].

Regional variation in the association between advance directives and end-of-life Medicare expenditures.

CONTEXT It is unclear if advance directives (living wills) are associated with end-of-life expenditures and treatments. OBJECTIVE To examine regional variation in the associations between treatment-limiting advance directive use, end-of-life Medicare expenditures, and use of palliative and intensive treatments. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PATIENTS Prospectively collected survey data from the Healt...