Advance Health Care Directives and Living Wills for Watsonville Residents

Start with what you want your instructions to communicate

An advance health care directive can express health-care wishes and identify someone to make health-care decisions. This page focuses on the written-instructions part: the preferences you want recorded and made available to the people who may need them. Choosing a health-care agent is a related but distinct decision, even though a directive can address both.

Before meeting, consider the situations or questions that have prompted you to plan. Note what you want a clinician or a person helping with your care to understand about your preferences. You do not need to arrive with polished legal language; a plain-language list of concerns and questions can make a consultation more focused.

• Write down the health-care choices or circumstances you want to discuss.
• Note any preferences you want explained in the document, along with questions about how they can be expressed.
• Keep the question of who might make decisions separate from the question of what instructions you want to communicate.

Prepare for a useful remote consultation

For a virtual meeting, collect the information you already have and keep it easy to refer to. If you have an existing advance health care directive or other planning documents, have them available so you can discuss what they say and what you want to address. You may also want to prepare a short list of questions in advance.

Useful discussion prompts include: What preferences do I want captured? Which parts of my instructions are especially important for others to understand? How can I make the relevant document accessible to people who may need it? If you are also considering who should make decisions, raise that as a separate topic rather than assuming that written preferences settle the agent choice.

• Gather any existing directive or related planning documents you want to discuss.
• Make a concise list of preferences and questions in your own words.
• Identify who should know where the document is kept, and ask how to make it accessible.

Keep written preferences and agent selection distinct

A directive can combine written health-care wishes with identification of a person to make health-care decisions. Those functions answer different questions: what preferences should be communicated, and who may make decisions. Thinking through them separately can help you explain what you want from each part and avoid treating the choice of an agent as a substitute for written instructions.

A financial power of attorney has a different role: it concerns financial matters, not health-care decisions. If you bring one to a consultation, identify it as a separate document so the conversation stays focused on the health-care planning you want to address.

Make the document findable after planning

Preparing a directive and keeping the relevant document accessible are separate from registering information about an executed directive. Registration is not a substitute for planning the document itself or deciding how people who may need it can find the relevant information.

As a practical step, decide where you will keep the document and whom you want to tell about its location. Ask during the consultation what options are available for making the information accessible. The goal is to ensure your planning is not merely completed but can be located when needed.

Plan with Codi M. Dada Law Office P.C.

Codi M. Dada Law Office P.C. has one in-person office at 802 Grant Ave, Novato, California, and provides virtual services throughout California, including Watsonville. Bring your preferences, existing documents, and questions to a remote consultation so the discussion can focus on what you want your written health-care instructions to communicate.