Engaging Chinese older adults in death education and advance planning: clinical practice implications

ABSTRACT

We live in a death-denying society, but not planning for death and dying in advance might leave individuals and the family with unfinished business and regrets. Chinese societies are rapidly aging. Thus, it has been increasingly significant to provide death education to enlighten the public on the importance of making plans and the information of current end-of-life care services and support. However, such educational programs are lacking in the literature. To fill the void, the team designed a culturally sensitive death education program and tested it with community-dwelling older adults in China. In this paper, we described the program design and reported some practice-related observations on the individual, family, health care providers, organization, and legal levels, hoping to shed light on designing and implementing death education programs for older adults in Chinese societies.

KEYWORDS:

• Death education
• advance planning
• community-dwelling older adults
• Chinese
• culture

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).