Healthcare Decision Making

Use 12-point, Times New Roman or Ariel font, single-spaced. Undergraduates include at least 1 scholarly source in this assignment. You will write about 3 – 4 paragraphs for each question.

This assignment is about health care decision making. An intervention that social workers may be involved in is helping clients consider and formalize decisions about care in cases where individuals may not be able to vocalize their own preferences. Consistent with the Resilience-Enhancing Model (REM) of the text, helping older clients make their own decisions is a critical and important later life intervention.

For this assignment, you will need to download the Caring Conversation Workbook which is loaded as a pdf file under Module #5: Lecture/ppt. Read through the instructions, and complete the various answers within the workbook. Actually write down your responses, as you will need to “make meaning” of your answers in the questions about this experience. Although you are doing this independently, consider how an older adult may respond to these questions if you were a social worker or other health care provider who was working through an advanced directive booklet him or her.

After completing the booklet yourself, write about 3 – 4 paragraphs for each question.

Overall Experience: Overall, what was this exercise like for you? Were there any questions that made you feel uneasy, uncomfortable, upset, anxious, or any related feeling? If so, what were they and why do you think that you had this experience? If not, why do you think that you did not have uneasy feelings?

Your Answers: Read over your answers. What do your answers say about who you are and your health care preferences? What do you want health care providers and your family to know about you?

Your Insights: What unexpected things did you learn about yourself from this experience? How might this influence your behaviors or decisions in the future?

Experience with Older Adults: Consider working through this as a social worker or health care provider with an older client. What might the experience be like for that person? What would the experience be like for you in this situation?

Risk situations and health decision-making. Advanced directives are good to have completed at any point in the life course, as accidents and health emergencies can happen at any age. However, consider older adulthood. What are two situations of later life where it is particularly important to have advanced directives in place? Provide some information about each situation and why this would be important.