Advance Health Care Directives and Living Wills in Newman

Separate your preferences from who may decide

An advance health care directive can express your health-care wishes and identify someone to make health-care decisions. These are related but distinct functions: written instructions communicate what matters to you, while naming a person identifies someone who may make decisions for you.

Start by asking which part of the plan you want to address. If your priority is recording treatment preferences, focus on making those preferences understandable to the people who may need them. If your priority is choosing a person to speak for you, the decision about whom to identify is central. You may want to consider both, but one does not answer every question raised by the other.

• What preferences do you want to put in writing?
• Do you also want to identify someone to make health-care decisions?
• Would the person you have in mind understand the preferences you want communicated?

Make written preferences useful to the people who may need them

A document can only communicate your preferences if the relevant people can find and understand it when they need to consider it. As a practical preparation step, make a list of the people you would want to know where the document is, and think about how you would explain its purpose to them. This is about access and communication, not a substitute for deciding what your preferences should be.

You can also note questions or wording you want to discuss before settling on instructions. Keep the focus on expressing your own wishes in clear terms; this page does not recommend any particular treatment choice.

• Identify who should know where your directive is kept.
• Write down questions about how to express your preferences clearly.
• Consider whether the people you want involved know that the document exists and what role it serves.

Keep health-care authority distinct from financial authority

A financial power of attorney serves a different role from an advance health care directive. Naming someone in a health-care document does not, by itself, address who may act for you in financial matters; those are separate planning questions.

When reviewing what you have already prepared, ask what subject each document addresses and what authority it is meant to cover. If your concern is who can handle financial matters, a health-care directive is not the document that answers that question. Keeping the roles distinct can help you identify what you still need to discuss.

• Is your question about health-care wishes or health-care decisions?
• Is it instead about authority over financial matters?
• Does each document you have serve the role you expect it to serve?

Plan for both preparation and access

Preparing a directive and keeping it accessible are different tasks from registering information about an executed directive. The California court self-help resource and the Secretary of State’s registry information address these as distinct steps. Consider which practical issue you are trying to solve: expressing preferences, helping the relevant people locate the document, or recording information about an executed directive.

Before seeking help, gather any existing health-care directive and a short list of the preferences or questions you want to address. That preparation can make it easier to focus a conversation on the document’s purpose and on whether you also want to identify a health-care decision-maker. Codi M. Dada Law Office P.C. serves clients virtually throughout California from its Novato office.