Advance care-planning and clinical decision-making

Advance care-planning (ACP), in the context of healthcare, is an optional process whereby people with decisional capacity at the time of making advance care plans record their preferences, priorities and wishes for a time in the future when they may no longer have capacity for health and/or social care decisions. Although ACP is optional, appropriate patients should be identified and supported, through insightful, compassionate serious illness conversations, to participate in ACP. ACP should act as a steer to inform clinical decision-making at times when patients are, because of lack of capacity, unable to share what matters to them.