Honoring Your Wishes

Honoring Your Wishes™ promotes and helps sustain a community-wide advance care process where individuals' health-care preferences are discussed, documented, and honored by families, friends, and the health-care community.

This easy-to-follow advance care planning process ensures that your health-care choices are clearly defined and acted upon.

University of Iowa Health Care recognized a need for an improved advance care planning process and participated with other community agencies to develop a program based on other successful community models. In 2010, the program, now known as Honoring Your Wishes, was launched in Johnson County.

Advance Care Planning

Advance care planning is a process for people to make informed decisions about health-care preferences based upon their values and beliefs. It encourages reflection and discussion with people’s health-care providers and their circle of support to determine health-care goals and interventions. As people age and their life circumstances and health conditions change, it is important to regularly review and communicate health-care preferences to ensure that health-care wishes are honored.

How It Works

Honoring Your Wishes™ will help you create an advance care plan at no cost. The initiative gives you an opportunity, with the help of a program volunteer, to talk about your future health-care goals and then make a written plan that describes your wishes to others in a legally binding way.