What is Advance Care Planning?
Advance care planning facilitates on-going, meaningful conversations by identifying a patient's values and beliefs around medical care decisions.
Why is advance care planning important?
Advance Directives
Understanding your values, wishes, and treatment choices.
Legal documents known as advance care directives allow your medical wishes to be known and enable you to designate a decision maker if you become unable to speak for yourself. They help ensure that your choices will be honored. The following list includes legal documents relevant to end-of-life decision-making and care. Some of these documents require legal counsel.
Medical Durable Power of Attorney (MDPOA)
A MDPOA is a signed document that gives authority to an adult, at least 18 years of age, allowing him or her to make necessary medical and healthcare decisions immediately upon signature or if you should you become incapacitated. This document does not need to be notarized or witnessed, and it does not need to be completed by an attorney.
Financial Power of Attorney (FPOA)
A POA is a notarized document that assigns authority to an adult at least 18 years of age allowing her or him to make decisions regarding your money or property. This document ceases to be in effect at the time of death.
Colorado Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) Directive
A Colorado CPR Directive is a document stating that emergency healthcare personnel or others may not perform CPR on you. This document is available from a healthcare provider and must be signed by both you and your doctor.
Five Wishes
Five Wishes is an advance directive document that addresses and documents your personal, emotional and spiritual needs, as well as your medical wishes. It also allows you to choose the person you want to make healthcare decisions for you if you are not able to make them yourself (in lieu of the MDPOA document).
Five Wishes encourages you to talk with your family, friends and doctor and tell them exactly how you wish to be treated if you become seriously ill. This directive can be very helpful for family members since they will no longer be required to make difficult choices and determine your wishes about your healthcare without sufficient information.
Proxy Decision Maker
A proxy decision maker is the individual appointed to make healthcare decisions when a MDPOA has not been identified. The appointment is made by mutual agreement (consensus) of family members and interested persons.
Living Will/Colorado MOST
A living will is a document signed by a person that instructs his or her doctor regarding the use of artificial life support measures if the person becomes terminally ill and is unable to make medical decisions. In Colorado, Living Wills may also be used to stop tube feeding and other forms of artificial nourishment but only if the Living Will clearly indicates this instruction and the person has a terminal illness. If the patient is able to swallow food and/or fluids, the Living Will won’t prevent the patient from being fed.
In Colorado, the Medical Orders for Scope of Treatment (MOST) form documents these wishes. Any healthcare provider, including Pikes Peak Hospice & Palliative Care, can document this.