Advance Health Care Directives and Living Wills in San Mateo

Separate the two decisions

A directive can serve two related but distinct purposes: expressing your health-care wishes and identifying someone to make health-care decisions. Before changing a document, ask which of those purposes needs attention. If your concern is the instructions themselves, review whether they communicate your preferences. If your concern is who would speak for you, focus on the agent designation rather than treating written instructions as a substitute for selecting that person.

This distinction helps keep the document focused. You can consider both purposes together, but they answer different questions: what preferences should be known, and who should make decisions when needed? This page focuses on the first question; the choice of agent is a separate decision.

• Do you want to clarify or update what you want communicated about health care?
• Are you separately considering who should make health-care decisions?
• Would changing one part address your concern, or do you want to review both?

Compare the documents by purpose

An advance health care directive is the relevant document to consider when you want to express health-care wishes. It can also identify a decision-maker, but that role is not the same as recording preferences. A financial power of attorney serves a different role: it concerns financial decisions, not health-care instructions. Reviewing a financial power of attorney alone therefore does not answer whether your health-care preferences are documented.

A practical comparison is to place the documents you already have side by side and identify what each is meant to do. Ask whether the health-care directive reflects what you want communicated and whether you also need to consider the person authorized to make health-care decisions. Separately identify financial authority documents so they are not mistaken for health-care planning documents.

• For health-care preferences, review the advance health care directive.
• For who may make health-care decisions, review the directive’s decision-maker provision.
• For financial decisions, treat a financial power of attorney as a separate document with a different role.

Prepare for a focused review

Before deciding what to change, gather the health-care directive and any financial power of attorney you already have. Note the parts you want to understand or revisit, and make a short list of questions about whether your preferences are clearly recorded. If you are also reconsidering who should make decisions, identify that as a separate topic rather than assuming a change to written preferences resolves it.

These are preparation steps, not legal or medical requirements. The purpose is to make the comparison useful: identify which document addresses health care, which addresses finances, and what question remains for each. Decisions about treatment preferences are personal; this review can help you organize what you want to discuss without deciding medical care for you.

Make the information available

Preparing a directive and keeping the relevant information accessible are separate from registering information about an executed directive. Consider who may need to know where your directive can be found and how they could access the information. Keep your own copy in a place you can identify, and consider telling the people who may need to locate it where to look.

Registration is not the same task as preparing or storing the document. If you are considering registration, first distinguish that choice from the practical steps of keeping the directive accessible. The goal is to avoid assuming that taking one step automatically performs the others.

Decide what question to address next

A useful next step is to identify the specific issue you want resolved: whether your written preferences need clarification, whether your choice of health-care decision-maker should be revisited, or whether you are looking at a financial document that serves a different purpose. Bringing the relevant documents and questions together can make a discussion more focused.

Codi M. Dada Law Office P.C. serves clients virtually throughout California from its Novato office. If you are in San Mateo, you can use a virtual service to discuss which document relates to your concern and what you want reviewed.