Advance Medical Directives
"Have you signed an Advance Medical Directive?"
"Have you signed a Durable Power of Attorney containing health care decision-making authority?"
The well-known cases of Karen Quinlan, Nancy Cruzan and Terri Schiavo come to many people's minds when the topics of Advance Medical Directives and medical Durable Powers of Attorney are discussed. Those cases involved women in comatose states who had not executed written statements setting forth their wishes and instructions regarding the health care that should be or should not be provided in the event of a serious accident or illness.
The Patient Self Determination Act, a Federal law, requires hospitals, assisted living facilities, nursing facilities, home health care providers and hospice care providers to ask you those questions when you are being admitted for care. That law is intended to help inform you of the rights that you have in the area of determining what health care you will receive.
The best time for you to learn of your rights and to make what might be life and death decisions regarding your future health care is when you are in good health. It may be too late to do proper planning and to execute appropriate legal documents after a serious accident or stroke has occurred.
Advance Medical Directives and Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment (POLST) are documents that you should know about and should consider signing before you become medically incapacitated.
An Advance Medical Directive is a written statement of intent directed to your family members, your health care providers and to the agent you have appointed in your Durable Power of Attorney to make your medical decisions. The Advance Medical Directive sets forth your desire to have, or to not have, extraordinary medical care discontinued when the application of life-sustaining treatment would only serve to prolong the process of your dying when:
you have been diagnosed in writing by your treating physician to be terminally ill and your death is imminent, or
you have been diagnosed in writing by two or more physicians to be in a permanent unconscious state in which you are medically assessed, within reasonable medical judgment, as having no reasonable probability of recovery from an irreversible coma or persistent vegetative state
A POLST is a pre-printed form that complements an Advance Medical Directive. It is prepared and signed by you (or your agent named in your medical Durable Power of Attorney) and your doctor or other health care provider and addresses, typically with more specificity, the doctor’s orders regarding treatment if you become seriously ill.
Advance Medical Directives are sometimes referred to as Health Care Directives, Living Wills or Directives to Physicians. Many medical care facilities have begun to make preprinted forms available to patients. However, those generic forms are often simplistic, poorly written and are often otherwise inadequate.
Advance Medical Directives come in all shapes and sizes. Some are well written. Many are not. Over the years we have prepared very thorough and understandable Advance Medical Directives for many satisfied clients who are nurses, medical doctors, Catholic priests and Protestant ministers, college professors and many others who have given lots of thought to the topics related to death and dying.
Executing an Advance Medical Directive, and a POLST, are the best means of assuring that your desires regarding life-sustaining health care will be made known to your family members and doctors and that these wishes will be followed by the agent named in your medical Durable Power of Attorney.
Please contact our office if you would like to meet with Dan about updating your Advance Medical Directive and your Durable Power of Attorney.