Advance Health Care Directives and Living Wills for Mount Shasta Residents

Start with the decisions you want to communicate

An advance health care directive can express your health-care wishes and identify someone to make health-care decisions. This page focuses on the written-wishes part of that work: what you want the document to communicate, and how to make those instructions accessible. Choosing the person who may make decisions is a related but separate question.

Before the consultation, consider the kinds of treatment or care situations about which you want to express preferences. Note the circumstances that matter to you and, in your own words, what you would want people to understand. These notes are a starting point for discussion, not a substitute for the final document or medical advice. You do not need to arrive with polished legal language.

• Write down the preferences or concerns you want to discuss, using plain language.
• Note any terms or situations you want explained before deciding whether to include them.
• Separate your treatment preferences from the question of whom you may want to make health-care decisions.

Gather the information that makes a remote meeting useful

For a focused virtual consultation, collect any existing advance health care directive or other document that you believe records your health-care wishes. If you do not have one, bring your notes instead. Also consider how the people who may need the document would learn that it exists and where they could find it.

A practical way to prepare is to make a short list of people who should know where the document is kept, questions you want answered, and any uncertainty about whether an older document reflects your current wishes. This is preparation, not a claim that any particular person must receive a copy or that a particular storage arrangement is legally required.

• Have the relevant existing document available, if one exists.
• Bring your questions and a concise list of the wishes you want to discuss.
• Think through how the document could be located by people who may need to refer to it.

Keep the document distinct from financial planning

An advance health care directive concerns health-care wishes and decisions. A financial power of attorney serves a different role: it concerns financial matters. If your preparation includes both health-care and financial questions, identify them separately so the consultation can address the right document for each purpose.

This distinction matters in practical terms. A document about health-care wishes is not a substitute for authority concerning finances, and a financial power of attorney does not serve the health-care role described here. Bring up any overlap or uncertainty rather than assuming one document covers both.

Make the directive findable when it matters

Preparing and keeping an advance health care directive accessible is a separate task from registering information about an executed directive. Registration concerns information about a directive that has already been executed; it is not a replacement for deciding what your wishes should say or making the document available to the people who may need it.

As you plan, consider who should know that a directive exists and how they could locate it. If you already have a directive, bring it to discuss whether it still reflects what you want to communicate. Questions about registering information can be discussed separately from questions about the content of your wishes.

Discuss your 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 for people in Mount Shasta. For a remote consultation, bring your existing document if you have one, your notes about treatment preferences, and the questions you want to resolve. That preparation helps keep the discussion centered on what you want the written instructions to convey and how they can be found.