It continues to be a challenging time for the health sector and more specifically advance care planning. We hope you are managing to keep yourselves and your loved ones safe and well.

At our general assembly meeting in August we undertook to provide you with more regular news and more opportunities for us to connect as a Society. We hope this newsletter provides you with useful information, news and the details about 2022 planned Society events.

Welcome and congratulations to our new board

We wanted to share a little about our new board members who have already met twice since the digital exchange.

2021 Digital Exchange

Thank you to those of you that were able to attend our first virtual exchange. It was a great success and has inspired the Board to consider more virtual events.
We asked attendees to provide us with feedback after the digital exchange and this is what you have said:

• Participants liked the exchange of “resources and real experience with advance care planning” and “the chance to reconnect with international colleagues in advance care planning, during a time when it has been difficult to travel and stay connected. Hearing about the excellent work that is going on in different parts of the world in this field” and 100% found the conference valuable.
• Suggestions for improvement included “while I really enjoyed the length of the presentations there were too many in my opinion. Fewer presentations or more breaks could help,” a desire for rapid access to the presentations on-line and easier event registration. There was also a call for more “perspective of community members and people with lived experience of illness: as presenters, attendees and on the conference organising committee”.
• Ideas suggested for future events included more on ethical and legal dimensions of advance care planning, decision-making and culture, research findings on the effectiveness and impact of advance care planning during the pandemic, community based advance care planning and consensus building on definitions of advance care planning and “Goals of care”.
• Both digital and in-person conference events were deemed important. Please keep your suggestions for future events coming to office@acp-i.org.

2022 Virtual Events – pencil into your diaries now!

Member only expert Q&As

We want to run three “member only” ask the expert sessions. We are thinking these would be 45 minutes long Zoom sessions. We would invite an expert to talk about a member requested topic and invite all members to join the Zoom conversation with the expert. We will set the dates for these once we have your topic requests.
Please send us your topic requests or key questions you would like us to gather an expert/s to answer for you to office@acp-i.org by 23 December 2021.

“What is in your advance care planning pill?” webinars

We will be running a number of one-hour Zoom webinars to provide the advance care planning community with opportunities to share the details of how advance care planning is constructed, implemented and evaluated in different jurisdictions.

These sessions will start with a presentation by one country/territory where they share what’s in the advance care planning pill in their area – how they structure advance care planning services, how they engage consumers and communities, how they prepare the workforce, how ACPlans are recorded, shared and used, systems and processes, legislation and the legal framework they operate under, how advance care planning is resourced, and how they measure and evaluate their services and approaches. They will also be asked to demonstrate the impact of their advance care planning service on consumers through a consumer story.
We will then have a break out session facilitated by the Board members to discuss the presentation.

We will ensure we run these webinars and different times across the year to support everyone across the globe to attend at least one live.

What is right about advance care planning?

In October, JAMA published an opinion piece titled “What is wrong with ACP?” (Morrison RS, Meier DE, Arnold RM. What’s Wrong With Advance Care Planning? JAMA. 2021;326(16):1575–1576. doi:10.1001/jama.2021.16430)
The Board has prepared a response to this opinion piece which has been accepted for publication (see commentary section of the JAMA viewpoint).

In addition, we wanted to bring a couple of other key papers to your attention:

1. Sinclair, C., Nolte, L., White, B.P. and M. Detering, K. (2020), Advance care planning in Australia during the COVID-19 outbreak: now more important than ever. Intern Med J, 50: 918-923. https://doi.org/10.1111/imj.14937
2. Montgomery et al’s Response to Morrison: Advance Directives/Care Planning: Clear, Simple, and Wrong (DOI: 10.1089/jpm.2020.0272 ). Carole Montgomery, Susan E. Hickman, Christine Wilkins, Erik K. Fromme, and Stephanie Anderson. Journal of Palliative Medicine 2021 24:1, 12-13
3. Advance Care Planning is So Right: Podcast with Rebecca Sudore and Ryan McMahan https://www.geripal.org/2020/10/advance-care-planning-is-so-right.html
4. Moody, S.Y. (2021), “Advance” Care Planning Reenvisioned. J Am Geriatr Soc, 69: 330-332. https://doi.org/10.1111/jgs.16903 and commentary on this:
   • Bradshaw, A., Bayly, J., Penfold, C., Lin, C.-P., Oluyase, A.O., Hocaoglu, M.B., Murtagh, F.E.M. and Koffman, J. (2021), Comment on: “Advance” care planning reenvisioned. J Am Geriatr Soc, 69: 1177-1179. https://doi.org/10.1111/jgs.17058
   • Moody, S.Y. (2021), Reply to: Comment on: “Advance” care planning reenvisioned. J Am Geriatr Soc, 69: 1179-1180. https://doi.org/10.1111/jgs.17059
5. Advance Care Planning: Challenges and Opportunities webinars 2020
6. Deconstructing the Complexities of Advance Care Planning Outcomes: What Do We Know and Where Do We Go? A Scoping Review. DOI: 10.1111/jgs.16801

We look forward to a connected 2022 for the Society.
Yours, ACP-I Board.