Transporting Care Preferences
for the Seriously Ill

If you have a loved one who is elderly and seriously ill, you know their health care status can change in an instant. Within minutes they could go from a nursing home to a hospital intensive care unit, with aggressive care being delivered along the way and at a hospital.

Whether your loved one wants aggressive treatment or not.

How can you be sure your loved one’s treatment wishes are honored as they move from one care setting to another? That’s the aim of a Center initiative called Transportable Physician Orders for Patient Preferences (TPOPP), a collaborative endeavor involving the Center for Practical Bioethics and Kansas City area emergency medical services, acute, long term, palliative, home care and hospice providers.  

The initiative will produce a form designed to express an individual’s preference for levels of treatment, from full treatment including resuscitation attempts to limiting the use of medically assisted fluids, nutrition and antibiotics.  

The form will be voluntary and is intended to help identify one’s wishes and assist physicians, nurses, health care facilities and emergency personnel to honor and carry out wishes for the use of life-sustaining treatment.

John Carney, the Center’s vice president for aging and end of life, says the timing for this effort is good. “Missouri passed a law last year addressing out of hospital do not resuscitate orders, but regulations have yet to be written,” Carney says. “In the meantime, the Kansas law is being reviewed.”

Carney says the steering group plans to introduce a model for this program in January 2009.

For more information or to arrange a presentation on TPOPP, call John Carney at (816)221-1100 extension 220, or email jcarney@practicalbioethics.org.

Links:

Layton Christom