#179 CPR, ReSPECT & Frailty: Resource to support discussions & make plans with Dr Lindsey Crockett

In this super discussion with Dr Lindsey Crockett I explore CPR and ReSPECT video resources available on the Care Choices website. These videos are truly brilliant showing how What Matters Conversations become tangible plans and robust documents. Listen in to hear the stories behind the videos and find out how you can access and use this valuable resource.

This episode has been kindly supported by the Living Well Dying Well Trust. The creation, development and content of the episode remains the responsibility of Clare Fuller.

Key messages

• Dr Lindsey Crockett’s  work in Advance Care Planning, frailty and end-of-life care.

• The CPR film tackles misconceptions about resuscitation and what it can mean for a frail person.

• The ReSPECT film shows how conversations can be recorded as useful, individualised plans.

• Frailty is about resilience and dependency, not simply age; people’s needs differ.

• Starting Advance Care Planning early can help avoid rushed decisions during a crisis.

• Lindsey’s “ISA” framework encourages professionals to identify, stratify and take action - by arranging or referring on important conversations.

• Care Choices’ films are free, and a public-awareness film about frailty is in development.

Resource

• Care Choices website: www.carechoices.uk  its resources page has all  the films discussed..

• CPR/resuscitation film and ReSPECT film: Free to watch through the Care Choices website and on YouTube.

• Rockwood frailty scale -  Mentioned as a way to describe levels of frailty.

• Listen to a previous episode featuring are Choices at "When I Leave This House, I Leave in a Box" How One Request Built a Service with Bill Thompson
  

Bio

Dr Lindsey Crockett

In 2010, I moved to Suffolk for my dream job as a country GP. It was something of a rude awakening. My fiercely independent, frail patients — some still living in the houses they had been born in — made it quite clear that it was my job to ensure that they could remain in their houses until their very end. Dying anywhere else would be a failure of duty of care on my part 

It was also a wonderful education.

Those patients taught me that dying is not fundamentally a medical event, but a deeply human one. Over the years I have been humbled by the seemingly effortless compassion within ordinary communities — neighbours, families and volunteers who instinctively know how to support the choices for someone as life becomes smaller and more fragile. With a little training, supervision and support, that humanity can become something extraordinarily powerful.

There lies the seed, the seedling and eventually the blossom of our Care Choices Service: creating something our increasingly busy healthcare system struggles to provide — the precious resource of time. Time to hear someone’s story, understand what makes their life worth living, what they fear losing and what they would want us to know if one day they could no longer tell us themselves.

I remain a country GP, Senior Partner at Peninsula Practice and Clinical Steward for Frailty and End of Life Care across Norfolk and Suffolk. My passion is to take the word “age” out of frailty and challenge medicine’s instinct always to fix. When frailty becomes irreversible, there is still an enormous amount we can do — but sometimes it begins by replacing “What is the matter with you?” with “What matters to you?”

Care Choices grew from what those Suffolk patients began teaching me all those years ago: with compassion, courage and time, we can help people live well until they die — and, when the time comes, die well too.