HomeDeciding Your Future Healthcare

Deciding Your Future Healthcare

August 4, 2021

This presentation helped us think about how to make decisions and communicate our preferences for future health care treatments should we be unable to express those preferences when they are needed.

We discussed the philosophy and laws around advance care planning and reviewed basic approaches to documenting your preferences (e.g., living will, health care proxy, Physician’s Orders for Life Sustaining Treatment [POLST]). This was an informative presentation on a critical topic.

Mary Ersek, PhD, RN, FAPN, is Professor of Palliative Care at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing. She holds a Master’s of Nursing and PhD from the University of Washington and a Bachelor of Science from Georgetown.

With NIH funding, she developed a palliative care curriculum for nurses and nursing assistants in nursing homes that has been disseminated across the USA, Europe, Japan, and Korea. In addition to leading numerous studies on end of life care, Dr. Ersek is a senior scientist at the Veteran Experience Center, a national VA quality improvement program that administers surveys to bereaved family members, who rate the care received by veterans in the last month of life.