Planning future care
Planning future care
If you, or someone you love, is living with an incurable or progressive illness, it’s important to have conversations about preferences for future care, sharing your wishes for how and where you’d like to be cared for. Here you will find more information about planning future care, as well as two short videos 'who will look after me and talk about my wishes?' and 'why is it important to share my wishes for end of life care'.
For information about making future decisions about medical treatment in the event of an emergency, visit our page about ReSPECT (Recommended Summary Plan for Emergency Care and Treatment).
Thinking ahead and having conversations about what is important to you can transform your experience at the end of life.
In north east Essex we have the My Care Choices Register. This is a secure database which health and social care professionals have access to, where you can record your priorities if you were to become more unwell in the future. You can create a record on the My Care Choices register by speaking to your GP.
You will be given a My Care Choices Record to fill out and you can record where you would prefer to be cared for if possible, what your views are about the type of care you would like, or prefer not, to receive, and who you would like to be contacted. Once the booklet is completed, please share this with your GP surgery so this information can be added to the My Care Choices Register database so other healthcare professionals can see it.
The information can be seen by your GP, community nurse, the hospital, St Helena Hospice and the ambulance service. By having your preferences recorded on the register, these teams can easily see what is important to you in a time of crisis.
The process of recording your wishes is known as advance care planning and it has been proven that people who have advance care plans are more likely to be cared for in their preferred place of care, to receive care in line with their wishes and priorities, and their loved ones are more likely to feel they receive coordinated care in a crisis.
For individuals with learning disabilities, Essex Learning Disability Partnership has created a slightly different advance care plan document to share what you want to happen at the end of life.