Framingham Advance Healthcare Directive Attorney

Ashland Estate Attorneys Serving Middlesex County & Other Nearby Areas

When a loved one become incapacitated, family members may struggle to ensure their wishes for care are respected. Without a legal document stating your wishes for care in this situation, your loved ones can face difficult decisions without guidance.

Advance health care directives and durable powers of attorney are the part of your estate plan that allow you to list your decisions regarding the medical treatment you receive and procedures to follow if you get severely ill or injured. Advance care planning allows for much to be accounted for, letting you protect your wishes for your future.

What Should be Included in an Advance Directive?

Simply put, your advance health care directive, or living will, is designed to keep instructions about your medical care when you can’t communicate those decisions yourself. The document keeps your decisions for:

• Health care proxy: You can name a person and grant them legal authority to make health care decisions and manage your medical records on your behalf. This health care agent will have the right to make medical decisions regarding resuscitation, tube feeding, breathing machines, or anything regarding treatment you receive. You get to name this person for yourself and inform them of your wishes so they may see to it that they are achieved.
• Instructions for care: You can outline your exact preferences for your life sustaining treatments should you be incapacitated or become permanently unconscious. Your advance health care directive tracks your decisions regarding DNR orders or pain relief measures.
• Instructions for death: You can document your wishes for disposal of your body, whether that’s through cremation or burial, or donation to science. You can also include specifics for your funeral.

Even after creating a health care directive, your feelings on certain procedures may change. You may also feel another person would be a more appropriate choice as your health care proxy. Your advance directive forms may be edited throughout your life to reflect your current wishes for treatment and end of life care.

Where to Keep Your Health Care Directive

After completing your draft, providing several copies to the appropriate people offers you another layer of protection and reassurance that your choices will be honored.

You should consider giving a copy of your advance health care directive to:

• Your named health care proxy
• Your loved ones
• Your medical institution to be kept in your record
• Any person mentioned in your directive

If you do choose to edit the document at any point, remember to supply anyone who had the initial version with the new and updated directive. You should also leave instructions to your proxy regarding where to find your parent copy of your directive.

Beyond ensuring the life and death you want, an advance health care directive allows your family to be free of the stressful guesswork involved in making decisions for you. You have a vision for the way your life continues. Contact a Cali Law attorney for health care directives and estate planning to ensure it happens.