Advance Care Planning

Abstract

Advance Care Planning (ACP) is a process supporting an individual at any state of health in discussing his/her life goals, care preferences and preferred place of death with his/her family members and healthcare professionals. This chapter will examine ACP in Singapore. It will examine benefits of ACP and barriers to ACP practice and suggest ways to increase the acceptance and implementation of ACP in the country. The implementation of ACP can achieve patient autonomy, avoid unwarranted suffering and enable patients to die with dignity. Death aversion, family dynamics, collusion, the lack of health literacy, treating physicians’ refusal to endorse the ACP document are barriers to the acceptance, discussion and implementation of ACP. It is important for the government to enhance public acceptance of ACP and facilitate the implementation of ACP through normalizing conversations about death and dying, reinterpreting the concept of filial piety to develop culturally appropriate campaigns for ACP, upstreaming the ACP discussion into usual health promotion activities, offering life education to students, adopting a multipronged approach to tackle collusion and adopting an interprofessional approach to ACP.