Update from the advance care planning programme – August 2020

This update from the advance care planning (ACP) programme includes information on speakers for the Ō tātou hiranga | What matters to us hui, whenua ki te whenua the new ACP guide for whānau, training for ACP/Serious Illness Conversation Guide (SICG) and welcomes a new staff member.

Ō tātou hiranga | What matters to us hui, 2–3 December 2020

We are excited to confirm our local and international plenary speakers for the virtual hui in December. The programme is available, registrations are open and the call for abstracts closes on 10 September.

Find out more about some of our fantastic speakers below.

Hector Matthews
ACP steering group member and the executive director Māori & Pacific Health at Canterbury District Health Board (DHB)
Māori lives matter – Hector will shine the spotlight on Māori inequity and the systemic biases that perpetuate inequities. He will challenge us to confront some uncomfortable truths about inequity and allow us to explore ways we can truly place people’s cultural frameworks at the centre of their care and wellbeing.

Rachelle Bernacki, Jo Paladino and Joshua Lakin
Ariadne Labs in Boston, USA
Leaning in to lessen fear: how structure can free clinicians, patients, and their whānau in exploring what matters most – Rachel, Jo and Joshua will share their experience with SICG development and supporting clinicians with complex conversations. This will include health care staff’s anxieties about broaching the topic and the fear that they might do consumers harm by increasing consumer fear/anxiety.

Kathryn Mannix
Author of With the End in Mind: Dying, Death, and Wisdom in an Age of Denial
Restoring the forgotten wisdom: how can we reclaim ordinary dying? – Kathryn will explore how medical advances have extended our life expectancies, changed where we die and made death into a medical failure instead of the natural, expected end of every life. She will ask what health care planners and practitioners can do to change public understanding of dying, so we all know more, plan better and feel less afraid.

Cari Borenko
Fraser Health, Canada
Pulling the pieces of the advance care planning puzzle together: from the pan-Canadian framework to a local schema – Cari will share the Canadian experience of implementing and integrating ACP, shared goals of care and SICG programmes, as well as the importance of widened community engagement.

Alex Psirides 
Intensive care specialist and co-clinical director of the tertiary intensive care unit, Wellington Regional Hospital
Moving from medical orders to shared goals of care in hospitals – Alex will be joined by members of the Health Quality & Safety Commission's patient deterioration team, to talk through why having a shared goals of care approach is important and how the shared goals of care principles were developed.

We look forward to seeing you there! Register now for Ō tātou hiranga | What matters to us.

Whenua ki te whenua – ACP guide for whānau

Whenua ki te whenua is the new ACP guide for whānau, which will soon be user-tested with whānau and communities with feedback integrated into the final version. Vanessa Eldridge has led this work in association with the ACP Māori advisory resource group.

 We are connected to the land from the first breath of life to our last.

Our spirit is carried within the belly of the wind to the resting place of the ancestors.

‘This proverb is about knowing who you are and where you are from – whakapapa. It draws on the caring, nurturing and upbringing of a loved one from birth to death, and the important role that family, friends and carers play.’ Len Hetet, designer.

For further information please contact Clare O’Leary at ACP@hqsc.govt.nz.

ACP and SICG training

The move to COVID-19 level three in the Auckland region meant we had to postpone the Auckland L1A DHB train-the-trainer two-day workshop to 5–6 November. There are two available spaces on this course and we will be working with DHBs to fill those in the next couple of weeks. If you are interested in being trained as a L1A trainer, please get in touch with your local ACP facilitator. DHB contact information is available on our website.

The other L1A train-the-trainer course is running in Wellington on 2–3 September 2020.

We are finalising attendees for four SICG train-the-trainer workshops planned for October. We have restricted numbers so that we can keep the workshops below the COVID alert level 2.5 and 3 gathering maximum of 10.

For all training-related enquiries please contact Leigh Manson at ACP@hqsc.govt.nz.

Welcome to Hayley McManus

The ACP team welcomes a new project manager, Hayley McManus, to the team. Hayley recently returned to New Zealand after living in Sydney for four years. She has worked in the health sector for over 13 years in project management roles, with seven years in clinical positions. She has a clinical background as a midwife and a Master’s in Public Health.