Advance Health Care Directives and Living Wills for Riverbank Residents

Start with what you want the document to communicate

A useful starting point is to identify the health-care preferences you want recorded and the questions you have about how those preferences should be expressed. An advance health care directive can express health-care wishes and identify someone to make health-care decisions. These are related functions, but they are not identical: written instructions address your wishes, while identifying someone addresses who may make decisions.

This page focuses on the written-instructions question. If you are also deciding whom to identify as a decision-maker, note that separately so the two issues do not get blurred together. A financial power of attorney serves a different financial role; it is not the same as a directive concerning health-care wishes.

Prepare for a virtual consultation

There is no need to arrive with polished legal language. Before a remote conversation, you can collect your own notes and the documents you want to discuss. These are optional preparation steps, not legal requirements.

• Write a plain-language outline of the preferences you want the directive to communicate. You can use short notes rather than trying to draft final instructions.
• Mark any words, situations, or distinctions in your notes that you are unsure how to express. Bring those as questions about how the wording may be understood.
• Make a separate list of questions about choosing a person to make health-care decisions, if that is also on your mind. Keeping this separate helps make clear whether your main concern is the content of your instructions, identifying a decision-maker, or both.
• Gather any existing advance health care directive or other planning documents you want to refer to. If you have none, simply note that; this is a planning conversation, not a document-collection test.
• Think about who you would want to know that a directive exists and where relevant documents are kept. You may want to bring a note about how the people involved could locate them.

Plan for people to find the document

Writing preferences and making relevant documents accessible are separate parts of planning. California court self-help information distinguishes preparing and keeping relevant documents accessible from registering information about an executed directive. Registration information and the document itself are therefore not the same thing.

As a practical step, consider who may need to know where the directive is kept and how they could find it. You can bring questions about registration to the consultation, while also considering how the people you have in mind would locate the document. The goal is to think about both what your instructions say and how they may be available when needed.

Keep the document’s role clear

An advance health care directive can express health-care wishes and identify someone to make health-care decisions. A financial power of attorney serves a different financial role. Keeping those purposes distinct can help you identify which questions belong in a discussion about health-care instructions and which concern financial planning.

The practical limit is that preparing written preferences does not, by itself, resolve every question about how the wording will be understood. If a phrase or situation is unclear to you, preserve it as a question for the planning conversation instead of assuming that the document answers it. Likewise, a question about who should make decisions is distinct from the question of what preferences you want written down.