Advance Care Planning

KYW Medical Reports Sponsored By Independence Blue Cross

By Dr. Brian McDonough, Medical Editor

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Cancer is a devastating condition—especially cancer that is not responding to treatment.

In these cases the patient and the family have to come to grips with thinking about what could potentially be the final days of life. One of the biggest decisions is how hard to fight and when to give up the aggressive care. This is a personal decision in each and every case and we all know stories where people given little hope fight back. But at some point there is often a need for a decision regarding how to approach those final days.

A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association has found that  families of patients dying of cancer felt their loved one had better care and quality of life when they died in a hospice rather than in a hospital's intensive care unit. These findings are a powerful argument for the importance of advance care planning. We know that how and where people die strongly shapes patients' dying experience and how family members remember it. Certainly there is an art to the care of patients and every effort should be made to help people live and have an excellent quality of life, but there needs to be thought about how to die as well.