Advance Health Care Directives and Living Wills for Mill Valley Residents

Start with the decision you want the document to address

An advance health care directive can express your health-care wishes and identify someone to make health-care decisions. Those are distinct functions within the same kind of document: your written instructions concern what you want, while identifying a decision-maker concerns who may act on your behalf.

This page focuses on comparing written treatment preferences with the other documents you may already have. Choosing a health-care agent is a separate decision, even though an advance health care directive can also identify that person. You can review the preference language without treating it as a substitute for considering who should make decisions.

Compare the documents by purpose

Before deciding what to change, make an inventory of the documents you have and the question each one answers. An advance health care directive is the relevant document to review for health-care wishes and a health-care decision-maker. A financial power of attorney serves a different role: it concerns financial decisions, not the health-care role described by an advance directive.

Keeping those purposes separate can make a review more concrete. If your concern is how your health-care preferences are expressed, compare the directive's written instructions with what you want communicated. If your concern is financial decision-making, recognize that a financial power of attorney addresses a different subject. Changing one document should not be assumed to resolve a question addressed by the other.

• For health-care wishes or a health-care decision-maker, review your advance health care directive.
• For financial decision-making, identify any financial power of attorney and keep its separate role in mind.

Check whether the written preferences still express what you want

Read the directive with a specific question in mind: do its written health-care preferences still reflect what you want people to understand? Note passages that feel unclear, incomplete, or no longer representative of your preferences. This is a practical review, not a medical recommendation about which treatment to choose.

For example, someone reviewing an existing directive might find that it identifies a health-care decision-maker but does not clearly communicate a preference they now want stated. That example illustrates a reason to compare the document's two functions; it is not a recommendation about what any particular person should write. A useful next step is to bring the current document and a short list of questions to a planning discussion.

Keep the document and its availability in view

Preparing a directive and keeping relevant documents accessible are separate from registering information about an executed directive. Registration is not the same task as preparing or storing the document, and it does not replace checking whether the document expresses your preferences.

As a practical preparation step, gather the directive and related planning documents you already have, and consider who may need to locate them if questions arise. This suggestion is about making existing documents easier to find; it is not an additional legal requirement. When deciding whether to revise anything, consider both the content you want recorded and how the relevant people could access it.

Choose a focused next step

A useful review separates three questions: what health-care wishes you want expressed, whether the directive identifies the person you want to make health-care decisions, and whether a financial power of attorney addresses a separate financial need. The answers may point to different documents, so avoid treating them as interchangeable.

If you are considering changes, start by identifying the question that prompted the review and gathering the documents that address it. Codi M. Dada Law Office P.C. can discuss advance health care directives and related planning with Mill Valley residents through virtual services or at its Novato office.