Five Wishes, the country’s most preferred advance care planning program (ACP) has won the 2022 Caregiver Friendly® Award from Today’s Caregiver magazine and Caregiver.com. The Caregiver Friendly® Awards are designed to celebrate products, services, books, and media created with the needs of caregivers in mind.
Five Wishes won for their 25 years of support and service to caregivers. The program was developed as the first advance care plan to address personal, emotional, and spiritual wishes, in addition to medical treatment. It’s called the “living will with heart and soul” because it’s based on what is most important – being able to define a roadmap for how you want to be cared for.
Five Wishes has distributed more than 40 million advance directives and has received overwhelmingly positive feedback from caregivers. The program approach is more effective in producing desired benefits and outcomes than intervention-focused approaches. It’s the start of an important conversation between patients, families, and their caregivers. It gives everyone peace of mind to know that healthcare wishes have been discussed and documented. No one has the burden of guessing someone’s wishes should an emergency arise.
“I really appreciate how well the Five Wishes booklet is organized and how gentle the questions are. I have found that Five Wishes is the easiest and most thorough form to use in confronting such a potentially intimidating subject, said Trisha Jauchler, MS, MA, RDT/BCT from Los Angeles, California.
Garg Barg, Editor-in-Chief of Today’s Caregiver interviewed Joanne Eason, president of Five Wishes to discuss the popular advance care plan. “For the last 25 years that we’ve been working with people we’ve distributed 40 million of our paper documents and when you think about it as a healthcare advocate or health care agent for someone, it’s probably their caregiver, so in essence, we’ve worked with 40 million caregivers over the last two-plus decades. We’re also seeing a blooming interest in other organizations like patient advocates and end-of-life doulas and other caregiving organizations that do the groundwork of caregiving every day and see the value of Five Wishes,” said Eason.
More than 40,000 partner organizations assist in the distribution of Five Wishes, most notable over 1,000 hospices as well as Caralell, a caregiver empowerment organization, that just completed an advance care planning program using Five Wishes in urban Chicago. Five Wishes is available in several formats (paper, digital and PDF) and comes in 30 different languages.
Today’s Caregiver is the first national magazine for all family and professional caregivers. “The average caregiver is responsible for over $40,000 in health-related expenditures each year, in either personal or directed funds,” said Barg, “This award is designed to help family caregivers recognize and reward those organizations who will care for them in as committed a manner as they care for their loved ones.”
It has been embraced by families, caregivers, community groups, faith communities, medical and legal providers, and businesses.
About Five Wishes
Five Wishes is an advance care planning program that allows people to make healthcare decisions before they are seriously ill. It is comprised of customizable solutions for healthcare providers that include training, consulting, evaluation, and documentation based on the renowned Five Wishes advance directive, a 12-page legal document that goes beyond legal and medical decisions to address what matters most: comfort, care, personal relationships, and spirituality. Five Wishes is a program of the national nonprofit, Aging with Dignity, which has been leading the discussion on advance care planning for 25 years. To learn more, go to www.FIveWishes.org and follow Five Wishes on social media: LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.
About The Caregiver Friendly® Awards
Caregiver Friendly® Awards are presented by Today’s Caregiver magazine to celebrate outstanding books, media, products, and services designed with the best interest of the family caregiver in mind. Today's Caregiver magazine, launched in 1995, is published by Caregiver Media Group, which also produces the Fearless Caregiver Conferences, www.caregiver.com, and The Fearless Caregiver book which teaches caregivers how to become their loved one’s fearless advocates within the healthcare system.
