Additional Resources
Advance Care Planning Workbook
This workbook will walk you through the process of advance care planning. You will find conversation tools, a quality of life assessment worksheet, treatment wishes worksheet, and end-of-life plans that are very helpful tools to guide the conversation with your loved ones. Helping to define what is important to you based on your goals, your perspectives, and your values are extremely important parts of this conversation.
Download the Advanced Care Planning Workbook PDF.
Advance Care Planning Toolkit
If you are looking at this tool kit, you are either thinking of making a health care advance directive (such as a living will or durable power of attorney for health care), or you may have already signed one. In either case, you should be aware that just having a written advance directive by itself does not ensure that your wishes will be understood and respected. Studies have shown that standard advance directive forms do little to influence end-of-life decisions without: 1) informed, thoughtful reflection about your wishes and values, and 2) personal communication between you and your likely decision-makers before a crisis occurs.
Download the Advanced Care Planning Toolkit PDF.
Making Medical Decisions for Someone Else: A How-To Guide
If you make health care decisions for someone else—or might at some future point—this handbook is for you.
Download the Making Medical Decisions for Someone Else: A How-To Guide PDF.
A Guide to CPR
CPR stands for Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation and is an emergency medical process involving a number of emergent medical techniques that try to replicate the function of a person’s beating heart and lungs which have stopped working. Stating you do not want CPR in an advance directive is a preference, not a DNR medical order. Learn more about CPR and DNR orders using this guide.
Download the ACP Decisions Guide to CPR.
Change Your Death, Change Your Life with Roman Barraza, MD, PhD
In this TedxTraverseCity talk, Dr. Barraza, medical director of Munson Palliative Medicine and Hospice Care, discusses how we address death in our culture and the medical field.
Helpful Websites
The following are links to healthcare sites that you might find helpful. These sites are not part of Munson Healthcare and Munson Healthcare has no control over their content or availability. Inclusion on this list does not constitute an endorsement by Munson Healthcare. Please consult your physician regarding any health concerns.
- Aging with Dignity
- Begin the Conversation
- Being Mortal: PBS Special
- Caring Connections
- Caring Info
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Alzheimer's Disease and Healthy Aging
- Change Your life, Change Your Death - TED Talk by Dr. Roman Barraza
- End of Life Education Materials for Families and Professionals, by Barbara Karnes, RN
- Getting Your Affairs in Order
- National Health Care Decisions Day
- National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization
- National Institute on Aging
- POLST (Physician Order for Life Sustaining Treatment)
- Prepare for Your Care
- The American Bar Association Tool Kit for Health Care Advanced Planning
- The Conversation Project