Brown, the director of the Center for Humanizing Critical Care at Intermountain Medical Center, has become an advocate for educating patients on the need for thorough advanced care planning. He authored and article, “Five Approaches to Make Advance Planning Useful,” to explain these ideas that were published in McKnight’s Long Term Care News.

“Most of us want to have control over events when our health worsens or life seems short. As a society, we worry about the high cost of treatments with little chance of success in patients near the end of life, treatments disproportionately provided in the ICU,” Brown said in the article.

Brown discusses the different strategies that everyone should be aware of when advanced care questions arise. Would you want to be admitted to the intensive care unit? Would you prefer to be made comfortable or do everything possible to keep you alive?

But Brown also said that the answers are not clear cut and every situation needs to be fully explained to the patient and their family. That is where some hospitals anywhere in the American health system have faltered.

“While many hospitals aren't quite ready for this kind of guidance, it's good for all healthcare providers to start the conversation about how best to care for us when we fall sick,” Brown said in the article.

You can read the entire article by Dr. Brown by visiting the McKnight’s website.