The New York Department of Health recently requested public input from health care providers and patients on how to make advance care planning forms more understandable and easy to use. The Department provided a response template with questions focused on people’s experiences with three forms: the health care proxy, out-of-hospital do not resuscitate order (DNR) […]
Kaiser Health News recently carried an article encouraging people to create videos to help explain what’s in their advance directives, which are often overly complex legal boilerplate or overly simplistic checkbox forms. One thing I like about the article, Straight From The Patient’s Mouth: Videos Can Clearly State Your End-Of-Life Wishes, is the discussion of […]
NDY’s comment letter can be summarized as follows: We do not oppose payment to physicians for advance care planning discussions with their patients, but we want the payment regulation delayed until the disability community and others can, with CMS support, develop new advance care planning informational materials that do not rely on “better dead than […]
Thursday, April 16, was National Healthcare Decisions Day. We probably should have made note of it. But then again, we’ve pretty much ignored it since one post I wrote in 2008 making note of the day and NDY’s take on it: In case you missed it, today is National Healthcare Decisions Day (NHDD). We’re all invited to […]
In the aftermath of the New Jersey Health and Senior Services Committee hearing on assisted suicide, the public debate has continued in the press. One example is George Amick’s column in favor of legalization. Amick acknowledged that the opposition includes people with disabilities: Groups representing Catholics, medical practitioners and people with disabilities were on hand […]
National Healthcare Decisions Day is April 16th. I hadn’t really expected the Centers for Disease Control to be one of the leading resources for my intro on this topic, but they had quite a bit to say: April 16th is recognized each year as National Healthcare Decisions Day to inspire, educate, and empower the public […]
Felice J. Freyer, medical reporter for the Providence Journal, reached out to Second Thoughts Connecticut when covering implementation of Rhode Island’s new MOLST law (Medical Orders on Life-Sustaining Treatment, in some states called POLST for Physician Orders on Life-Sustaining Treatment). Second Thoughts CT testified against a MOLST bill in Connecticut and was successful in blocking […]
As regular readers of the NDY blog know, the disability community has concerns about Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment (POLST). (For NDY’s overall take on the subject, go here, and for NDY’s summary policy paper on POLST, go here.) For one thing, even though it says “for” life-sustaining treatment, it would be more accurate to say “on” […]
This week, the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Stateline carried an article entitled “New End-of-Life Measure Quietly Sweeps the Nation.” The measure described is Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment (POLST), sometimes also called Medical Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment (MOLST). According to the National POLST Paradigm website, POLST originated in 1991, and 14 states had adopted it by […]
Much of the state level legislative activity concerning POLST (Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment) has been carried out under the general public’s radar. But when Governor Chris Christie vetoed the New Jersey POLST bill yesterday, it hit the news feed. According to NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM and the Governor’s veto message – While noting the prospective benefits in […]
