Hearing Their Voice: Advance Care Planning for the Homeless

Homeless individuals are seldom offered the opportunity to complete advance directives and designate decision makers. During a catastrophic illness, health care providers are left to do aggressive, life-prolonging treatments that the patient may not want while seeking decision makers who may not be familiar with the patient or what their wishes would be. The authors spearheaded a program to offer homeless individuals the opportunity to review and complete an advance directive and parlayed that work into a secondary project to provide a comfortable end-of-life experience for homeless patients.