How to Choose a Health Care Proxy

The person who makes your health care choices when you are not able to is recognized by a number of legal documents including the advance directive, living will and the durable power of attorney for medical issues form. All these documents are the same thing and called different names depending on the state in which you reside. But how do you choose the person in that document? Read on to learn how to choose a health care proxy.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

1. Decide who will make the choices you would have made under the circumstances. A health care proxy is someone who steps into your shoes. Who in your life will do that?
2. Decide who will make good choices. Sometimes we don't want to have to make the hard choices about health care, so think about a person in your life who would be comfortable making a life-threatening choice that you don't want to make.
3. Ask the person you have in mind to be your health care proxy if they are willing to take on the responsibility. People want to help, but they need to know what the responsibility entails.
4. Explain your beliefs and wishes for life with the person you have chosen. Let them know where you stand on living a long life possibly in pain or unconscious. Discuss how comfortable you are with dying and whether it should be avoided at all risk or that you are comfortable to move on.
5. Choose a person who lives close or can come quickly to make your health care choices. Accidents and illnesses can happen fast, so you may need someone to make the health care choices fast too. Make sure the health care proxy can arrive quickly enough to make the choices.
6. Decide on someone who will make the choices quickly enough so that the doctors don't need to override their procrastination. It is good to make well informed decisions, but don't delay once the decision has been formulated.
7. Execute a living will. The living will sets out the outline of what you wish to happen if you can't make your own medical decisions. In the living will a health care proxy is chosen. Make sure you have the legal document that gives your decision maker legal authority to act on your behalf.
8. Give your primary care doctor a copy of the living will and ask him to include it in your medical record.
9. Register your living will with the United States Living Will Registry. The Registry files your living will for when you need it. A health crisis can happen anywhere and if the document is only on file with your doctor and you are in another state, the living will may take too long to arrive to help.

Tips & Warnings

• Give your health care proxy rights to discuss your medical history and issues with the doctor.
• Contact an attorney to draw up the document. Many attorneys have a package including a living will, a will and other power of attorney documents.
• A living will is only for life threatening medical decision-making. The living will does not give the proxy authority to make non-life threatening medical decisions.