End of Life Care Plan: How to Create Care Plan for the Dying

The End-of-Life Care Plan (EOLCP) Template is designed to help palliative care providers carefully assess the needs of patients who are nearing the final stages of life. It records their medical priorities, acknowledges treatment wishes, and organizes advance planning. With this template from SOAPsuds AI Medical Scribe, clinicians can:

• Log key patient details, including medical history and current conditions.
• Document information from advance directives along with ethical and legal aspects.
• Prepare next steps and send supporting documents to families, caregivers, or extended care teams.

What is an End-of-Life Care Plan?

An end-of-life care plan, sometimes called an advance care plan, is a structured document that respects a patient’s health choices, goals, and preferences during the later part of life.

End-of-life planning is not limited to clinical or psychological support—it should also address emotional and spiritual needs. Since these plans often involve different caregivers, legal matters such as living wills should also be taken into account.

In this article, we outline the essential parts of an end-of-life care plan template and share a ready-made AI-powered version to give clinicians more time for direct patient care.

Why are End-of-Life Care Plan Templates Important?

Using a template provides healthcare teams with a reliable way to create open conversations between the patient, their relatives, and the care staff. This helps reassure families or caregivers, easing some of the emotional weight in challenging moments.

Research in the Journal of Palliative Care shows that using a structured template on time improves the quality of end-of-life care delivery. This highlights how crucial these templates are in supporting thoughtful and respectful care for patients.

A detailed care plan template lays out each important aspect of care needed in the final stages. It primarily focuses on the patient’s wishes, ensuring they are valued and supported. These components are explained below.

Main Components of an Advance Care Plan Template

Care plans differ from one patient to another, so it is important for a template to capture essential details. A clear structure also helps clinicians save time while ensuring nothing is missed. Here are the key sections found in an advance care planning template.

Patient Information and Current Clinical Status

The plan usually contains basic personal information, present diagnoses, and relevant history.

Clinical Preferences and Carer Involvement

To make care more specific, the template includes the patient’s treatment and intervention preferences. If requested, it can also state their preferred place of care or location of death.

It should also record who is part of the decision-making process. A strong template notes discussions with relatives and caregivers, while also providing a way to arrange communication or referrals to hospice services.

Plans for Symptom Management

This part covers the patient’s current pain and symptoms along with the planned methods for managing them.

Psychosocial and Spiritual Support

To address broader needs, the template often includes the individual’s spiritual or cultural views. It also considers any psychosocial or emotional issues that require attention.

Legal and Ethical Considerations

Every plan should include legal and ethical aspects. If patients are able to understand and communicate, their consent must be taken before any treatment. Patients also retain autonomy to refuse medication or procedures, and such decisions must be documented in the plan.

The level of detail required for these notes can make documentation a challenge. Before SOAPsuds AI Medical Scribe, staff at Compass House Medical Centre struggled with administrative pressure as patient demand increased. This added stress to clinicians trying to manage lengthy documentation.

"Before using SOAPsuds, I spent hours after clinic finishing patient notes, which left me drained at the end of the day," shares Dr. Sarah Mitchell, Consultant in General Medicine at Riverside Medical Center. "Now, documentation happens seamlessly in the background, giving me the freedom to dedicate more energy to patient care and collaborative initiatives with my team."

How to Build an End-of-Life Care Plan Effectively

A patient-centered approach makes the planning process smoother and more complete, while also ensuring it reflects the patient’s goals. Here are a few steps to create an effective care plan:

Prepare existing records

Before the session, gather patient records, test results, treatments, or any documents that provide context about the patient’s medical background. With SOAPsuds, clinicians can use the context feature to add spoken or written details directly into the system.

This also makes it easier to revisit important backgroundinformation in later sessions, whether for problems raised or for follow-up notes.

Conduct an end-of-life assessment

Once the key elements are clear, an assessment can be completed using those details. Instead of downloading forms, SOAPsuds AI Medical Scribe generates a ready-made end-of-life assessment template that can be further customized.

Communicate with family

At the end of a consultation, families or main caregivers should be updated on medical and legal decisions made by the patient. With SOAPsuds templates, clinicians can instantly create documents like letters of intent or competency statements based on the session notes.

Inform hospital staff

To ensure continuity of care, the healthcare team should also be updated after the assessment. SOAPsuds identifies follow-up actions from your notes and lists them automatically in the same session. Tasks can then be edited, added, or marked as done.

End-of-life care documentation is often emotionally draining, as it requires careful detail. Since patients at this stage need full human attention, manual note-taking can lead to missed points. With AI-assisted care plan templates, documentation becomes more accurate and less time-consuming.

Make End-of-Life Planning Easier with SOAPsuds

SOAPsuds AI Medical Scribe provides a free, easy-to-use end-of-life care plan template designed to improve accuracy and save time. With patient approval, you can simply record the session while SOAPsuds handles the documentation. This gives clinicians more time for meaningful work. SOAPsuds allows you to:

• Transcribe: On any device, start transcribing while SOAPsuds records the consultation. Extra notes can be added manually for more context.
• Customize: Choose your end-of-life care plan template, and SOAPsuds fills in the sections using your conversation and notes.
• Transform: Once the plan is complete, you can generate other related documents, such as ACP documentation, as required.

SOAPsuds is trusted to support over 10,000 consultations weekly and meets international data protection standards, including HIPAA, GDPR, PIPEDA, and APP.

Free End-of-Life Care Plan Templates

End-of-Life Assessment Template

This template helps hospice and palliative care workers record essential information about a patient’s health condition and care goals, ensuring a complete approach to planning.

Advance Care Planning Documentation Template

This template is designed for hospice and palliative care professionals to record medical decisions focused on the future. It supports conversations around patient wishes, values, and treatment choices.