Written advance directives are crucial to ensure that healthcare preferences are honored if you are no longer able to make decisions for yourself.
Advance directives help:
- Clarify Wishes: Advance directives allow you to document specific medical treatments you want or do not want, such as life-support measures, resuscitation, or artificial nutrition and hydration.
- Relieve Family Burden: Outlining your preferences in advance directives helps family members make difficult decisions during stressful situations, reducing emotional strain and potential conflicts.
- Empower the Individual: Advance directives give you control over your own health and body, ensuring your values and beliefs are respected even if you lose the ability to communicate them.
- Guide Healthcare Providers: Advance directives documents provide specific guidance to medical professionals, enabling them to deliver care that aligns with your desires.
- Provide Legal Protection: Advance directives offer legal assurance that decisions made on your behalf are consistent with your documented preferences, reducing potential disputes.
- Encourage Communication: Documenting your wishes in advance directives fosters open communication and mutual understanding about topics that are often difficult to broach, or not discussed at all.
Check out the other lessons in this course for concrete ways to put your wishes in writing:
- Advanced Care Planning Worksheet: A form to print, fill out, and bring to your primary care provider to help jumpstart the documentation of your wishes.
- Health Care Proxy Forms: Print the one legal in your state, fill out what you can, and bring to your primary care provider for review and signature to expedite legal documentation of who you would want to make health decisions for you if you were no longer able.
- MOLST-POLST Forms: Print the one legal in your state, fill out what you can, and bring to your primary care provider for review and signature to expedite legal documentation of specific things you would and wouldn’t want if your health situation became life threatening.