Medical Decision Making
What happens if you receive the difficult news that you have been diagnosed with a serious, life-limiting, or potentially fatal illness? Just the sound of “cancer,” “stroke,” “kidney failure,” “lung disease,” or “Alzheimer’s” can throw our world into a tailspin.
Following the initial shock, many questions may come to mind:
- What do I do next?
- What does this mean for my future? My family?
- How do I find out about treatments?
- How do I get the information I need to make informed decisions about my medical care?
Finding answers to these important questions can feel overwhelming – Guiding Wishes can advise you and your loved ones.
Treatment options are often revealed during goals-of-care meetings with primary and specialist medical providers, where the nature of the illness and possible treatment options and outcomes are discussed. Goals-of-care decisions become the basis of the patient’s plan of care.
Guiding Wishes can help prepare you for goals-of-care meetings and help make sense of the complicated medical information discussed during these meetings by:
- Identifying questions to ask medical providers
- Clarifying what’s important to you as a person
- Exploring quality-of-life measures that align with your wishes and values, including:
- Pain and symptom management
- The care setting you wish to be in (home; hospital; rehabilitation facility; skilled nursing facility)
- The level/types of medical treatment you wish to receive
- Reviewing the burdens and benefits of treatment options presented by medical providers