Advanced Directives Essay

Does your family know what you want should you become extremely ill or injured? Are you comfortable with allowing them to make a decision about your end of life care? If not, you would be interested in doing some Advanced Directive. Health Care Advance directives are legal documents that allow you to convey your decisions about end-of-life care ahead of time. They provide a way for you to communicate your wishes to family, friends and health care professionals, and to avoid confusion later on. “Normally, people communicate their wishes directly to their doctors. But when a person can no longer communicate sufficiently, another process for decision-making is needed. That is the role advance directives play. If no advance directive has been prepared, someone else may be called upon to make health care decisions that the person may not want.” (Sabatino, 2007) Most people think that advanced directives are for elderly people that however are just not true. The fact remains that younger people have more to lose should something happen to them then older people. A perfect example of this would be if you were in a terrible car accident, being 29 years old, with a growing family, having major head injuries, and being on a ventilator. Does your spouse know what you want should that happen? If you had an advanced directive living will written, your spouse would know that you do not want to be kept alive if the ventilator is doing everything for you. Or if you are an elderly man, who is in his late 90s and has had multiple bypass surgeries. If you want to be a DNR, should the next surgery not be as successful, you would need to sign some legal documents to make that official. Those documents are need so your wishes can be carried out by your family without your family members having to make that difficult decision when they are not emotionally stable. There are a few different types of Health Care Advanced Directive documents; the two primary ones are a living will and

References: Fremgen, B. F. (2009). Medical Law and Ethics. (3rd Ed.) Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education. Sabatino, C. (2007). Advanced Directives Retrieved from http://www.merckmanuals.com/home/sec01/ch009/ch009e.html