Negotiating end-of-life decisions in Advance Care Planning (ACP)

While patient-centered approaches and patient autonomy have been adopted by medical professionals all around the world, Asian communities often place an importance on family involvement and participation. This cultural practices extends even to end-of-life (EoL) decisions of the patient, which is often the focus of Advance Care Planning (ACP) consultations. Therefore, a common phenomenon in the ACP consultation is to see a misalignment of perspective between patients and care-givers with regards to what should be done when highly dilapidating life-sustaining

Lim Ni Eng is currently Assistant Professor in the School of Humanities, NTU, and part of the Medical Humanities Research Cluster in the school. He received his doctoral degree in Applied Linguistics from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). The scope of his disciplinary training includes interactional linguistics, conversation analysis, multimodal discourse analysis, and corpus linguistics. His ongoing interest is on the interactional, socio-cultural and cognitive operations at work in everyday and institutional talk. Ni Eng’s research agenda is in medical communication, looking at how doctors and patients interact within the medical settings of Urology, Ophthalmology and Palliative Care. His current project revolves around the practices of talk in Advance Care Planning (ACP) consultations in the hospital, where patients, medical personnel and care-givers have to engage in negotiation on end-of-life decisions for the terminal patient.