Dr Ben Gray, General Practitioner, Primary Health Care & General Practice Department, University of Otago, Wellington
Dr Ben Gray
Advance Care Planning (or ACP) is the process of thinking about, talking about and planning for future health care and end of life care. In its delivery, this seems a very clinically focussed, individual health care process, so what relevance has it got for Public Health?
Actually a lot. We know that we spend around seven times more in the last year of life than the average spent in all other years of a patient’s life (2). This problem will be exacerbated as the baby boomers die.