Experiences with advance care planning: nurses' perspective

The aim of this paper is to report the findings of a case study that explored the phenomenon of advanced care planning and advance care directives in residential care settings in Australia. In particular, this paper focuses on the experiences of Registered Nurses with advanced care planning and advance care directives.

Nurses need to know how to engage with residents and families when they invest time and effort on advanced care planning and documentation of advance care directives.

A case-study design involving participant observation, field note recording, semi structured interviews and document analysis was used. Data were collected over 7 months. Data analysis involved thematic content analysis.

The factors that enhanced and inhibited the experiences of the Registered Nurses with advanced care planning were identified. The enhancing factors include; 'it is their essence of who they are', and 'back-up from family members and other nursing staff’. The inhibiting factors are 'lack of time', 'a culture of do everything and don't go there', and 'lack of family involvement'.

The findings of the current study provided nurses with evidence of the positive nature of experiences of older people, family members, and nurses themselves with advanced care planning in an attempt to better implement and practise advanced care planning.