Advance Health Care Directives and Living Wills in Santa Clara

Separate your treatment preferences from the choice of agent

An advance health care directive can serve two related but distinct purposes: it can express your health-care wishes, and it can identify someone to make health-care decisions. Thinking through each purpose separately helps you explain what you want documented and what you expect from the person you select.

This page focuses on written treatment preferences and making the document available to people who may need it. Choosing an agent is an important, separate decision; the directive may address that choice, but naming someone does not itself describe your treatment preferences. A financial power of attorney has a different role: it concerns financial decisions, not health-care decisions.

• Consider which health-care preferences you want to communicate in writing.
• Separately consider whether you want to identify a person to make health-care decisions.
• Keep financial decision-making separate from health-care planning.

Prepare for the remote consultation

A useful consultation starts with your questions and the choices you want to discuss. Before meeting, collect any existing advance health care directive or other relevant planning documents you can readily locate. Note whether you have written preferences already, whether you have identified a possible decision-maker, and what feels unresolved. These are preparation prompts, not legal prerequisites.

You can also make a short list of topics you want your written instructions to address. For example, you might want to discuss how to express preferences about care or how to make your wishes understandable to the people who may be involved. Bring your own wording or questions rather than assuming you need to arrive with a finished document.

If your main question is who should make health-care decisions, flag that separately from questions about treatment preferences. If you are also considering financial authority, identify that as a distinct planning issue.

• Gather existing documents you want to discuss.
• Write down preferences, uncertainties, and questions in your own words.
• Identify which questions concern treatment instructions, agent selection, or financial authority.

Make the document useful when it is needed

Preparing a directive and keeping it accessible are separate from registering information about an executed directive. Practical planning includes considering who may need to know where the document is kept and how they could locate it. The point is to make your written preferences available to the people who may need them, rather than treating the document as paperwork to store and forget.

As you prepare, consider who should be told about the document’s location and whether the people involved understand that it includes written health-care wishes. These are practical questions to discuss; the key is that creating a document alone does not communicate its location to anyone.

• Consider where you will keep the document so it can be located.
• Make a note of whom you may want to tell about its location.
• Ask what, if anything, you want to know about registering information concerning an executed directive.

Choose the next planning conversation

A focused next step is to decide what you want the consultation to accomplish: organize written treatment preferences, discuss identifying a health-care decision-maker, or clarify how those two parts relate. If you have questions about financial decision-making, raise them as a separate topic because a financial power of attorney serves a different role.

Codi M. Dada Law Office P.C. offers virtual services throughout California for people in Santa Clara and elsewhere in the state. You can prepare by gathering the documents and questions you want to discuss and identifying which decisions remain open.