Advance Care Planning Discussion: Susan Hickman, Sean Morrison, Rebecca Sudore, and Bob Arnold

One of my favorite Piece of My Mind essays in JAMA is by Rebecca Sudore, titled, “Can We Agree to Disagree?” 

And today our guests agree to disagree.  

And yet, and yet…

They also agree across a whole range of issues, some of which surprised us.

This is the latest in our series of podcasts on concerns about, and potential of advance care planning.  If you’re new to this discussion, don’t start with this podcast!  Start by reading this article by Sean Morrison, Diane Meier, and Bob Arnold in JAMA, and this response from Rebecca Sudore, Susan Hickman, and Anne Walling. Then listen to these prior podcasts with Sean Morrison and Rebecca Sudore about this issue, and we recently discussed differences between Advance Care Planning and Serious Illness Communication with Juliet Jacobsen and Rachelle Bernacki.  

On today’s podcast we ask our guests about areas in which there might be agreement or disagreement, including:

• The Best New York style bagels are made in California.
• Assigning a surrogate decision maker is important for everyone, including those who don’t have serious illness.
• Where does POLST fit in with this debate?
• All decisions are made in advance, the question that we are debating is how far in advance and what to call it
• Completion of advance directives and billing codes for advance care planning as quality metrics

Among other topics.  I’m heartened that we could have this discussion as a field, as it shows that we’ve grown to the point where we can agree to disagree respectfully with each other.  

We can work it out!

Links to a few couple items mentioned on the podcast:

• Objectives for Advance Care Planning
• 2018 Systematic Review of Systematic Reviews on ACP

-@AlexSmithMD