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This chapter examines the reform of the Lome Convention which dominated European development policy in the late 1990s. The case of Lome illustrates the inflated expectations of the EU and ACP (African, Caribbean, and Pacific states), and the inadequate capacity to deliver policy objectives. The reform process can only be understood within the broader context of the EU’s attempt to establish a more effective and coherent international European presence.

This chapter provides an introduction to Advance Care Planning (ACP). It cites the underlying purpose and principles of ACP, in response to patient need. It reflects on the deeper significance of ACP conversations. Lastly, it presents some hope and expectations, and suggestions for planning ACP in different settings. ACP discussions are important. They are a key means of improving end of life care and of enabling better planning and provision of care in line with the needs and preferences of patients and their carers. The practice of ACP affirms the use of advance statements, in which patients clarify their wishes, needs, and preferences for the kind of care they would like to receive, and the means of leading a fuller life meanwhile. It can also include advance decisions or refusals of specific treatments including cardio-pulmonary resuscitation (CPR), and the appointment of a person to act as a proxy surrogate.

This chapter provides an overview of Advance Care Planning (ACP) within the hospice or specialist palliative care inpatient setting. It examines the breadth of ACP amongst the inpatient population, barriers to ACP in the hospice, triggers for ACP discussions, communication issues, and ACP as death approaches. It shows that the breadth of ACP reflects the heterogeneous population served by hospices and specialist palliative care units. ACP is a continuum and may change over several discussions or occur at unplanned moments. Teams should develop a professional culture which recognizes ACP as an integral part of holistic patient assessment. Communication of ACP wishes between professionals within primary care and inpatient units is essential. Meanwhile, successful ACP requires investment in training, specific communication skills development, and team debriefs.

This chapter discusses the purpose and use of advance directives (ADs) and advance care planning (ACP) within the context of ESRD. It also presents empirical evidence about the degree to which ADs and ACP have met their intended goals, interventions to enhance the use and value of ADs and ACP, and new research that helps define how to initiate and facilitate effective ACP for patients with ESRD.

Advance care planning (ACP) was introduced to Singapore in the late 2000s in the form of local projects that encouraged conversations on end-of-life concerns, beginning first with residents in several nursing homes. High patient receptivity to the concept of planning ahead for care and death was encouraging, which prompted Ministry of Health to approve an S$18.1m effort to develop and promote ACP nationally in 2011. Since then, the practice of ACP has gradually spread throughout the country’s public acute care hospitals, most community hospitals, and all nursing homes, as well as a handful of eldercare providers, with close to 5,000 plans lodged electronically, 2,000 ACP conversation facilitators trained across the health and social care continuum and more than 1,000 community ACP advocates activated.

This chapter outlines a theory grounded on the so-called attentional constitution principle (ACP). The ACP contends that attention is constitutive of humans’ perceptual knowledge about individuals. It expands research on perception and demonstrative identification, and is grounded in the idea that the epistemology of empirical beliefs should fit together with the psychobiology of attention in order to explain how human agents navigate and analyze their environment. In contrast to the nonbiological epistemology of knowledge or the nonepistemological psychobiology of attention, the ACP holds that the function of human attention is mainly to serve perceptual knowledge through the extraction of causal information. The following sections of the chapter formulate the ACP and introduce a concept of information that is useful and relevant to the theory.