Planning Ahead: Focus on Advance Care Planning

Advance care planning is an essential process for clients with dementia or other life-limiting conditions. Learn to provide ethical and effective advice in this critical area of legal practice with this online short course from UTS Open.

Lawyers who work with older people play an important role in providing advice on advance care planning, particularly for people with dementia. This course will equip you with an understanding of clients’ legal rights when planning ahead for the possible loss of decision-making capacity. You’ll explore:

  • the legal and practical aspects of advance care planning (ACP)

  • how to improve ACP documents and processes to reflect clients’ values and preferences

  • decision-making capacity, including how to recognise and respond when client capacity may be in question

  • how to support decision making for people with dementia

This short course is part of a training series that develops lawyers’ knowledge and skills as ‘dementia-capable’ practitioners, with a focus on the following attributes: knowledge, professionalism, legal rights and risks and capacity. Other courses in the series include Understanding Dementia: Facts and Foundations (on-demand) and Elder Abuse: Strategies for Prevention (on-demand).

This short course will enable participants to:

  • Improve client engagement in advance care planning

  • Learn best practices for advance care planning documentation

  • Manage capacity issues appropriately and implement strategies to support client decision-making capacity

  • Build upon their existing professional expertise to become a dementia-capable legal practitioner

  • Earn Continuing Professional Development (CPD) points: for NSW lawyers seeking to include this study towards their legal CPD requirements, note that completion of this short course may count as 2 CPD units (one legal CPD unit per hour).