An Alternative Approach to Advance Care Planning

Graceful Conversations was created in 2010 when I responded to the significant gap in communications between healthcare professionals and the patients they were charged with providing good medical care. Drawing from over 20 years of clinical chaplaincy and healthcare ethics development, I found that people want their doctors to know them as a person before being treated as a patient. Doctors need to know valuable information about a patient before they can design a treatment plan or respond to a healthcare crisis.

Graceful Conversations provides an educational and consulting approach to create a document containing this valuable information about the person for the doctor to know what matters and is meaningful for the person living their life now. No projections into the unknown future, no decisions need to be made before a medical issue arises. The statement of medical preferences enables the person and their doctor to begin meaningful conversations into the person’s need for healthcare services with understanding and purpose with the doctor’s commitment to providing good medical care.