CAMPAIGN TO END UNWANTED MEDICAL TREATMENT GUIDING PRINCIPLES
- Honoring the dignity, values, and healthcare choices of every person at each stage of his or her illness.
- Ensuring that consumers are empowered and have access to the full range of well-coordinated medical care and treatment, including curative care, palliative care, and hospice care.
- Educating the public, patients, families, caregivers and providers about the rights of patients to determine how much and the types of treatments they receive ranging from all treatment options available — to their right to refuse unwanted, unnecessary, costly, or life-prolonging treatment if they so choose.
- Improving the quality of discussions between patients and healthcare professionals about advanced and terminal illness and end-of-life decisions.
- Encouraging the use of and compliance with legal documents that articulate patients’ care preferences, including advance directives.
- Creating economic incentives and reimbursement policies for health care providers that reward those who follow patients’ expressed wishes and penalize those that do not.
- Creating a formal mechanism to record, report, and evaluate unwanted treatment.
Production of these briefs was supported by Compassion & Choices, the Elder Justice Coalition and the Consumer Coalition for Quality Health Care as supporters of the broad-based Campaign to End Unwanted Medical Treatment: A campaign dedicated to ensuring patients and consumers receive the medical care they want — nothing less and nothing more.
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The views expressed in the policy briefs are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the organizations with which they are affiliated nor the board and staff of the National Academy of Social Insurance. In accordance with the procedures of the Academy, the briefs were reviewed by a committee of the Board for completeness, accuracy, clarity, and objectivity.
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The National Academy of Social Insurance (NASI) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization made up of the nation’s leading experts on social insurance. Its mission is to advance solutions to challenges facing the nation by increasing public understanding of how social insurance contributes to economic security. The National Academy of Social Insurance partnered with the Campaign to End Unwanted Medical Treatment to research and write the policy briefs that are published in this compendium.National Academy of Social Insurance (NASI) • www.nasi.org
