Feeding Options in Late Dementia - VSED and MCF

Several weeks ago, Mercedes Bern-Klug, PhD, MSW, Meredith Levine, LMSWM, APHSW-C, and I presented at the annual SWHPN conference: VSED Advance directives for dementia: Are they legal and implementable? Is there a middle ground?  

Yesterday, we reprised that presentation for a select group of nursing home social workers, Here is the video. This one-hour presentation has three parts:

Part 1:  Thaddeus Pope (professor, Mitchell Hamline School of Law) provides a policy overview of VSED (voluntarily stopping eating and drinking) advance directives and their legality.

Part 2:  Mercedes Bern-Klug (professor, University of Iowa School of Social Work) discusses a study that she and colleague Meredith Levine conducted in which nursing home staff members were asked what they thought about advance directives that requested that people not feed them when they no longer could feed themselves, developed by people while they had the decisional capacity to make an advance directive, to take effect when they were in the late stages of dementia.

Part 3: Meredith Levine, senior elder justice specialist, The Weinberg Center for Elder Justice) presents the findings from the study referenced above and then discusses a new feeding option for people experiencing the late stages of dementia, Minimal Comfort Feeding. This new feeding option was developed in the state of Washington by physician Hope Wechkin and colleagues and is explained here.