The Advance Care Planning and Healthy Living Through Faith project aims to increase African American participation in advance care planning activities throughout the life span, including but not limited to executing advance directive documents. Unfortunately, advance care planning has not been embraced within African American communities; only 18-36% of African Americans have an advance directive in place, and they are much less likely than other racial and ethnic groups to do formal Advance Care Planning.

While explaining the disparity is complicated, several surveys of African Americans have concluded that this group’s spiritual beliefs can conflict with traditional goals of advance care planning, palliative care and hospice. The Center’s previous work with African American pastors and congregations strongly suggests that advance care planning promotion must be rooted in the cultural and spiritual life of African American communities. It also highlighted the need for pastoral education around advance care planning throughout the lifespan and end- of-life issues.

This Advance Care Planning in African American Faith Communities project directly engages faith communities to promote advance care planning.

For more information, contact Cindy Leyland, cleyland@PracticalBioethics.org, 816-979-1357.

.

TPOPP is the Kansas and Missouri version of POLST (Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment). POLST is a voluntary national program that seeks to better align treatment plans with the goals and values of seriously ill patients living with life-limiting illness. Under POLST, more than 40 states have adopted standardized medical order sets for such patients. These actionable medical orders follow patients across care settings.

The Kansas/Missouri initiative, sponsored by the Center, is the country’s only bi-state initiative. TPOPP depends on extensive participation and coordination among and between providers and care settings (e.g., hospitals, long-term care, EMS, etc.) for successful implementation. The Center piloted a program in Topeka in 2009 and has been training Kansas/Missouri providers at various stages of development of TPOPP coalitions since 2012.

For more information about TPOPP