Advance Health Care Directives and Living Wills in Palo Alto

Written preferences and decision-making authority are different choices

A directive may express your health-care wishes and identify someone to make health-care decisions. If your main goal is to record treatment preferences, focus on whether the written instructions clearly reflect what you want communicated. If your main concern is who may make decisions, consider that separately: naming a person and expressing preferences are different functions of the document.

The person you identify and the instructions you record should be considered together, but choosing an agent is not the same as explaining your preferences. Before settling on wording, consider what you want the document to communicate and whether the person you identify would understand those wishes. This is a practical discussion about your intentions, not medical advice.

• What health-care wishes do you want written down?
• Do you also want the directive to identify someone to make health-care decisions?
• What would you want that person to understand about your preferences?

Know what this document does not replace

An advance health care directive concerns health-care wishes and health-care decisions. A financial power of attorney has a different role: it concerns financial matters, not health-care preferences. A directive should therefore not be treated as a substitute for planning how financial decisions are handled.

Keeping the purpose clear helps you identify what questions belong in a discussion about this document and which concern a different planning tool. If you are considering both health-care and financial arrangements, ask about each separately rather than assuming one document covers both.

Make the instructions useful to the people who may need them

Preparing the document and making it accessible are separate practical steps from registering information about an executed directive. Consider who may need to know that the document exists and how the relevant people could locate it when needed. A document that is difficult for the relevant people to find may not communicate your instructions when they are looking for them.

As preparation, you can write down the preferences you want to discuss and list the people who may need to know where the document is kept. These are organizational steps to help communicate your wishes; they are not legal execution requirements.

• Identify the wishes you want the written instructions to express.
• Consider who should know the document exists and where it can be found.
• Keep the question of registering information about an executed directive distinct from preparing and keeping the document accessible.

Choose a planning approach that fits your purpose

If your priority is communicating treatment preferences, center the discussion on the instructions you want recorded. If your priority is identifying who may make health-care decisions, make that a separate, explicit part of the conversation. If you want both, consider whether the instructions and the person identified are consistent with the same intentions.

A useful next step is to bring a short list of the preferences you want to communicate and questions about how the directive addresses them. You can also ask how to keep the document accessible to the people who may need it and whether information about an executed directive can be registered. Codi M. Dada Law Office P.C. offers virtual services throughout California from its Novato office.