Advance Health Care Directives and Living Wills in San Jacinto

Start with the decision the document needs to address

A useful first question is whether you want to communicate treatment preferences, identify someone to make health-care decisions, or address both. An advance health care directive can do both: express health-care wishes and identify a decision-maker. Those are related but distinct functions. Written instructions communicate what matters to you; naming someone addresses who may make decisions.

Consider what you want the people involved in your care to understand if you cannot communicate your preferences yourself. You might organize your thoughts around the kinds of care or circumstances you want the directive to address, then identify questions that need further discussion. This is preparation, not a substitute for medical advice.

• Which preferences do you want to communicate in writing?
• Do you also want to identify a person to make health-care decisions?
• What should the person involved in your care know about your priorities?

Keep health-care authority separate from financial authority

An advance health care directive concerns health-care wishes and health-care decisions. A financial power of attorney serves a different role: financial matters. The fact that a person is named in one document does not, by itself, answer who has authority under another document or what that other document covers.

This distinction can change the next planning step. If your concern is who can speak about treatment, focus on the directive. If your concern is who can handle financial matters, that is a separate authority question. If you have both concerns, list them separately rather than expecting one document to address both.

• Write down whether each concern is about health care or finances.
• If a person is named in more than one document, clarify which role you mean in each.
• Ask how the documents relate if you are unsure whether a particular decision is covered.

Make the instructions findable when they matter

Preparing a directive and keeping its information accessible are separate from registering information about an executed directive. Planning where relevant information will be kept can help the people who may need it know where to look. Consider whom you want to tell and how that person can locate the information.

Before discussing your plan, you can gather any existing health-care directive or related planning documents and note where they are stored. If you have already registered information about an executed directive, include that in your notes. These are practical preparation steps; they do not determine whether a document is valid or resolve a question about its scope.

• Make a list of existing documents and where you keep them.
• Consider who should know how to locate relevant information.
• Separate questions about the document’s contents from questions about where information is recorded.

A focused way to prepare for planning

Bring your treatment-preference questions and authority questions as separate topics. For example, you may want to discuss what your written instructions should communicate while also asking whether the person you have in mind is being given a health-care role, a financial role, or both. This is an example of how to organize a discussion, not a recommendation about whom to select or what treatment to choose.

Codi M. Dada Law Office P.C. serves San Jacinto clients virtually from its statewide California practice. A practical next step is to gather your existing documents, make a short list of preferences you want to communicate, and identify any uncertainty about who may make health-care decisions or handle finances.