#78 Advance Care Planning: Listening not box ticking with Professor Alison Leary

In this episode it is my pleasure to talk with Professor Alison Leary. Alison is a Senior Consultant at the World Health Organisation, Human Resources for Health, and the Chair of Healthcare & Workforce Modelling at London South Bank University.

It’s an important episode and based on Alison’s family experience. We talk the impact of receiving a form in the post to initiate Advance Care Planning, what it felt like and how valuable messages and nuances were lost.

We also acknowledge the importance of having conversations and listening to cues as the basis for person centred Advance Care Planning.

Key messages from guest

• Alison and I connected over Twitter (X, I know!) in response to a letter she shared from a hospital about Advance Care Planning in preparation for a pulmonary rehab clinic meeting

• The letter, for her husband,  asked about End of Life decisions and came as a shock 

• It made Alison reflect on how conversations are started

• Alison stresses the form was great, but the delivery was poor

• We talk about the importance of nuances in Advance Care Planning

• Alison describes the “taskification of care”, where care is reduced to tick boxes

• The “disruption of biography” is explored by ALison when End of Life Care decisions are made without the context of discussion about person centred What Matters Most approach

• Alisosn suggests that, strategically, organisations need to think about the delivery of Advance Care Planning 

• We explore the document Alison’s husband received in detail seeing the good elements within it

• We close by highlighting the importance of listening in Advance care PLanning

Bio: 

Professor Alison Leary PhD RN FRCN is a Senior Consultant at the World Health Organisation, Human Resources for Health, and the Chair of Healthcare & Workforce Modelling at London South Bank University.

She undertakes projects around the modelling of complex systems in healthcare. Her interests are in the complexity of healthcare, mathematical models and data science.

She is a registered nurse and is particularly interested in specialist and advanced practice.

Alison is the Director of  The International Community Nursing Observatory (ICNO) which was launched by the QNI in 2019 to analyse data and trends in the community nursing workforce data in greater depth, to aid understanding of the challenges faced by services.