During July and August, Robert Santulli, MD and Geisel M2 Marisa Diiorio will be offering a one-hour educational session about the Dartmouth Dementia Directive (DDD).
The Dartmouth Dementia Directive was created by Megan Bunnell, MD GSM '19 during her Swigart Ethics Fellowship, under Dr. Santulli's mentorship. The DDD is for persons who are currently cognitively well but concerned about developing dementia in the future and want to ensure that their wishes for care will be honored should they lose mental capacity. Standard advance directives alone may be less well suited for persons with dementia, because of the very gradual loss of decisional capacity in Alzheimer's disease and other serious cognitive disorders. The DDD offers the opportunity to choose different levels of care depending on the stage, or severity, of dementia. The DDD and related information are available at the DDD website, https://sites.dartmouth.edu/dementiadirective/. Interested persons can also sign up for a presentation (live or on zoom) on the DDD website. This presentation has been approved for one hour of AMA PRA Category 1 Credit or non-physician participation credit by DHMC's Center for Learning and Professional Development.
