April 14, 2015
NASW is pleased to continue its support for National Healthcare Decisions Day, now in its eighth year. You can participate in this observance by encouraging your clients to consider, discuss, and document their goals for their health care. This is also a good time to prepare, review, and share your own advance directives with your health care agents and health care practitioners.
National Healthcare Decisions Day emphasizes that advance care planning is an ongoing process of communication that enables people to direct their health care. Completion of advance directives is but one component of advance care planning.
Social workers play an integral role in facilitating clients’ understanding of and participation in advance care planning. What tools and models do you use in your practice?
Please use #NHDD to follow National Healthcare Decision Day developments on Twitter.
NASW RESOURCES
NASW Practice Perspectives: Reexamining Advance Care Planning
Legal Issue of the Month: Social Workers and Advance Directives
Consumer-friendly information about advance care planning
Hospice and palliative care practice tools, resources, and announcements
NASW Standards for Palliative & End of Life Care
NASW–NHPCO Advanced Practice Specialty Credentials in hospice and palliative social work
Social Work Policy Institute report on hospice social work
Continuing education (national- or chapter-level)
RESOURCES DEVELOPED OR OFFERED IN COLLABORATION WITH NASW
National Healthcare Decisions Day Web site
Hospice Foundation of America program on Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, presented in partnership with NASW (available beginning April 22, 2015)
Joint Commission consumer brochures addressing palliative care and memory problems and dementia
Leadership Council of Aging Organizations Advanced Care, Hospice, and End of Life Principles
National Consensus Project for Quality Palliative Care, Clinical Practice Guidelines for Quality Palliative Care
OTHER RELATED RESOURCES
Consumer-friendly information about advance care planning from the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization
Free archived webinars on POLST, end-of-life planning, and ethics in end-of-life decision making, offered by University of Iowa School of Social Work
Institute of Medicine report, Dying in America: Improving Quality and Honoring Individual Preferences Near the End of Life, and associated resources
Social Work Palliative and End-of-Life Care listserv (Beth Israel Medical Center)
Center to Advance Palliative Care
Social Work Hospice and Palliative Care Network
Chris Herman, MSW, LICSW
NASW Senior Practice Associate
