Meetings were organised for patients and informal caregivers to foster awareness and to provide information. In the second phase of the project, several approaches were developed to help caregivers, patients and informal caregivers with the planning and execution of conversations aboutĮnd-of-life care. This yielded as the most important causes of the delay of these conversations: the factors of timing (when is the right moment?), reserve (because of the potential emotional despair of the patient) and hope (who am I to rob a patient of their hope?). The first phase of the project consisted of research: a study of the relevant literature on previous projects on the matter and a small empirical study in the Eindhoven region. The project aimed to prevent unnecessary admissions and treatments for these frail patients by stimulating physicians, patients and informal caregivers to start conversations about end-of-life care together at an earlier stage. Just like others in the country, the Eindhoven group noticed that regularly, very frail elderly people were admitted to hospital in acute situations without there ever having been conversations about their wishes concerning treatment options at the end of life.

In 2014, a group of physicians of the Catharina Hospital in Eindhoven (The Netherlands) started a project called “Talking about end-of-life care in a timely manner”.

A timely manner