Advance Directives

Advance Directives and Other Medical Forms

Many of the decisions you or your loved ones face during serious illness often can be eased by preparation. Advance directives forms

• help your family and caregivers understand your wishes should you become unable to communicate those yourself and designate someone to make health care decisions for you
• are legal documents that accurately reflect your decisions and comply with your state's law
• should be discussed with your family, your physician and other caregivers, and your attorney
• should be completed, signed and copies given to your family, physician and other caregivers, and your attorney

Living Will
Five Wishes
Medical Durable Power of Attorney
Donor Directions for Anatomical Gift

Living Will

A Living Will is a document that helps you express how you want to be treated if you are seriously ill and unable to speak for yourself. It is a written declaration that tells whether you want life-sustaining procedures to be withheld or withdrawn if, at some future time, you are terminally ill and either unconscious or otherwise incompetent to decide whether any medical procedure or intervention should be accepted or rejected. A Living Will is generally completed before you become a patient in a health care facility.

Five Wishes

The Five Wishes document helps you express how you want to be treated if you are seriously ill and unable to speak for yourself. It looks to all of a person's needs: medical, personal, emotional and spiritual. Five Wishes encourages discussing your wishes with your family and physician.

Five Wishes lets your family and doctors know:

1. Which person you want to make health care decisions for you when you can't make them
2. The kind of medical treatment you want or don't want
3. How comfortable you want to be
4. How you want people to treat you
5. What you want your loved ones to know

Medical Durable Power of Attorney

A Medical Durable Power of Attorney is a written document that appoints another person, called an agent, to make health care decisions for you if you are unable to make your own health decisions. It gives your agent the power to consent to giving, withholding or stopping any health care, treatment, service or diagnostic procedure.

Donor Directions for Anatomical Gift

Colorado statutes allow you to donate all or any part of your body. If you wish to be a donor, Centura Health encourages you to make your wishes known in writing by completing a Donor Directions for Anatomical Gift Form or a similar document.