RT Article
T1 Guiding the Future: Rethinking the Role of Advance Directives in the Care of People with Dementia
JF The Hastings Center report
VO 54
A1 Gaster, Barak
A1 Pope, Thaddeus Mason
LA English
PB Wiley
YR 2024
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1882385179
AB When people lose capacity to make a medical decision, the standard is to assess what their preferences would have been and try to honor their wishes. Dementia raises a special case in such situations, given its long, progressive trajectory during which others must make substituted judgments. The question of how to help surrogates make better-informed decisions has led to the development of dementia-specific advance directives, in which people are given tools to help them communicate what their preferences are while they are still able. Such directives allow the perspective of the person to play a clearer role in guiding decisions about their care. Dementia directives can never serve as rigid algorithms. Rather, they can be used to help inform conversations, to help surrogates make decisions that are better aligned with the preferences the person would have had. This essay lays out the proposed utility of dementia-specific directives and addresses some of the criticisms raised about them.
K1 Advance Care Planning
K1 Bioethics
K1 dementia advance directives
K1 medical decision-making
K1 surrogate decision-makers
DO 10.1002/hast.1553