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Ethnicity and Advance Care Directives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

Sheila T. Murphy ,
Joycelynne M. Palmer ,
Stanley Azen ,
Gelya Frank ,
Vicki Michel  and
Leslie J. Blackhall
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Extract

Advance care directives for health care have been promoted as a way to improve end-of-life decision making. These documents allow a patient to state, in advance of incapacity, the types of medical treatments they would like to receive (a living will), to name a surrogate to make those decisions (a durable power of attorney for health care), or to do both. Although studies have shown that both physicians and patients generally have positive attitudes about the use of these documents, relatively few individuals have actually completed one.

What underlies this discrepancy between attitudes and behavior with regard to advance care directives? One obvious explanation is lack of access. Emanuel et al. estimated that approximately 90 percent of the population desire an advance care directive, and they pointed to access as the major barrier. Yet interventions that increase accessibility have typically failed to yield more than a 20 percent completion rate. Thus, it appears that access is not the sole determinant of advance care directive completion.

Type
Article
Information
Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , Volume 24 , Issue 2 , Summer 1996 , pp. 108 - 117
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 1996

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