Advanced Care Planning Resources
Empowering decisions, shaping futures: Your guide to advanced care planning.
Advanced Healthcare Directive (Living Will) and Healthcare Power of Attorney
When the time comes, advance directives help honor the wishes of your loved one. An advance directive is a legal document that outlines choices about being kept alive by artificial means when suffering from a terminal illness, permanent brain damage, or advanced dementia.
These documents can then be used when we lose decision-making capabilities. While many of us have strong opinions about what kind of treatments we would like to keep us alive, few of us take the steps to ensure our wishes are honored.
The Advance Healthcare Directive allows you the right to give instructions about your healthcare and the right to name someone else to make healthcare decisions for you.
The Advanced Healthcare Directive becomes a legal document when it is completed by an individual with decision-making capacity, signed by two witnesses and notarized.
Once completed, a signed copy is given to your physician, to any other healthcare providers you may have, to any healthcare institution at which you are receiving care, and to any healthcare agents you have named.
This form can be obtained from your physician or healthcare provider as well as found and printed here:
We understand that talking about death and other end-of-life topics is difficult. Having conversations about advance directives may be uncomfortable, but they provide the clarity we need when the time comes to utilize them.
Do Not Resuscitate (DNR)
The DNR form is a medical order that communicates a person’s desire to forgo cardiopulmonary resuscitation should their heart stop beating and they stop breathing. It is utilized outside of the hospital setting, i.e., a patient’s home or in a long-term care facility during transport to or from a healthcare facility, and other locations outside acute care hospitals.
This form instructs EMS personnel regarding a patient’s decision to forego resuscitative measures in the event of cardiopulmonary arrest.
This form becomes legal once it is signed by the patient or by the patient’s legally recognized healthcare decision-maker if the patient is unable to make or communicate informed healthcare decisions. The patient’s physician must also sign the form and will keep the yellow copy, while the white copy is to be kept by the patient. The completed form must be readily available to EMS personnel for the DNR instruction to be honored.
This form can be obtained from your physician or healthcare provider’s office.
Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment (POLST)
The POLST form is a medical order that gives seriously ill patients more control over their care by specifying the type of medical treatment a patient wishes to receive at the end of life.
The form must be signed and dated by a physician, nurse practitioner, or physician assistant acting under the supervision of the physician, and the patient or their legally recognized healthcare decision-maker. The POLST form should be conspicuously posted or maintained near the patient.
The POLST form is intended to complement an Advance Health Care Directive and is not intended to replace it.
This form is normally bright pink and printed on cardstock. It can be obtained from your physician or health care provider’s office.
