Snapshot insight report: barriers to advance care planning
Download (PDF 7.55 MB)Summary of report content
Healthwatch Barnet engaged with some local residents via one-to-one interviews to explore their views on Advance Care Planning (ACP) and their experiences of it. They included a broad range of participants, both people who had already experienced ACP and people for whom ACP was a new idea and who did not have any pre-existing health conditions.
The key findings from this piece of work includes:
- There is a lack of awareness of ACP amongst participants, with many having never heard of ACP before. People consider ACP as clinical jargon and therefore not relevant to the ordinary patient in their journey.
- Those patients already utilising ACP due to their own lived experience of health issues had a good understanding of ACP.
- Once participants had ACP explained to them, the majority agreed that in principle they would respond positively to discussing ACP when their GP/clinician first made the approach to discuss it.
- However, some felt that it may upset their families and that they felt uncomfortable speaking about death. Cultural and religious taboos around the topic of death were also mentioned as being a barrier in discussing and progressing with ACP.
- Participants acknowledged the time constraints that health professionals, particularly GPs, face in discussing ACP during appointments. They did not wish to use GPs time when they were not acutely unwell.
The report contains recommendations about how to make ACP conversations easier.