Advance Serious Illness Planning Resources

The additional resources listed below can help you think more about your values and preferences and provide you with more information about medical treatments and medical decision-making.

Advance Serious Illness Planning on Paper

Available in French and English, for individual use and for ordering in bulk from print shops.

The last 4 pages serve as the Dear Doctor Letter.

Explainer Videos

Available videos:

CPR Decision Aid
Advance Care Planning Conversations
Deciding on a Representative (substitute decision maker)
Being a Representative (substitute decision maker)
What if you were hit by a bus?

Play

Bilingual CPR Videos

Cardiopulmonary resuscitation: let’s be ready to talk about it!

La réanimation cardiorespiratoire : soyons prêts à en parler!

Caregivers Resources

Much focus and attention is given to patients, rightfully so, however caregivers play an integral role in an illness journey. These resources have been compiled to offer supports and tools to empower a caregiver in their important role.

Free Caregivers Guide

Inspired by our own caregiving journey, we’ve created this free handbook to help you be more prepared for the task at hand, feel more yourself, and reduce your stress. We have also included 15+ worksheets and resource lists to give you the essential tools to support you in your role as caregiver.

Included in the guide:

how to define your role and set boundaries
list of Canadian financial supports for caregivers
5 tips for asking for help
the caregiver’s hospital survival kit
loved one’s needs assessment

+ many more tools and resources to help you along the way.

Plan Well Publications

Dr. Daren Heyland and colleagues have been scientifically validating the Plan Well system in clinical settings for over 20 years. The Guides you see today are the culmination of those years of research. To read more about how we got here and how our Guide was developed, feel free to browse through our publications:

We published an article in the journal Health Expectations detailing the process of English to French translation and cultural adaptation of the Plan Well Guide.

Randomised trial of a serious illness decision aid (Plan Well Guide) for patients and their Representatives to improve engagement in advance care planning.

In a post-hoc subgroup analysis, there was a significant difference in favour of the Plan Well Guide group in participants with a lower-than-median baseline score compared with those at or above the median. The use of Plan Well Guide led to a significant improvement among Representative (formerly called Substitute Decision Makers) who were the least prepared at the start.

A randomized trial of Plan Well Guide was recently published in CMAJ Open. The results showed that Plan Well Guide improves decision quality, patient and physician satisfaction, and reduces time physicians spend on their interactions with patients.

The Health Education Journal recently published findings from the Preparedness for the Future survey. The purpose of this paper is to describe people’s general state of preparedness for their future as older persons, identify specific attitudes towards ageing and key characteristics that portend a lesser degree of preparedness, and identify the issues that need greater emphasis. The findings show that people’s attitudes towards their future self as an older person are related to their state of future preparedness and may have an impact on their future health and well-being.

Articles by Year

2022

March 25

Journal of Palliative Medicine: Caught in a Loop with Advance Care Planning and Advance Directives: How to Move Forward? Experts in advance care planning discuss the problems associated with traditional advance care planning and deliberate embracing our new approach ‘advance serious illness planning’!

2021

June 30

BMJ Supportive & Palliative Care: Randomised trial of a serious illness decision aid (Plan Well Guide) for patients and their substitute decision-makers to improve engagement in advance care planning

March 13

Aging Clinical and Experimental Research (2021): Challenges and facilitators in delivering optimal care at the End of Life for older patients: a scoping review on the clinicians’ perspective

February 2

Journal of General Internal Medicine (2021): Randomized Controlled Trial of a Decision Support Intervention About Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation for Hospitalized Patients Who Have a High Risk of Death

2020

November 25

Patient Education and Counseling, Volume 104 – Issue 4: Effect of “Speak Up” educational tools to engage patients in advance care planning in outpatient healthcare settings: A prospective before-after study

September 23

MedRxiv Preprint: Supporting decision-making on allocation of ICU beds and ventilators in pandemics