Make your health care wishes known

No. Wills and living wills have confusingly similar names, but they are very different legal documents.

A last will and testament (a “will”) is the primary estate planning document. You can use a will to describe how you would like your assets to be distributed after your death. If you have minor children, you can name guardians for them in a will too. However, you cannot use a will to address medical issues.

A living will, also known as a health care directive, is a document you use to give instructions to your health care professionals in case you ever become incapacitated due to a serious medical condition. You cannot use a health care directive to provide for the distribution of your assets.

You may want to create both a health care directive and a will. These documents can both be part of a comprehensive estate plan. Your health care directive details your wishes for medical care, and your will contains instructions regarding who should receive your assets after your death.

When you sign a health care power of attorney, you are giving your health care agent broad powers over your future medical decisions. For this reason, you should choose this person carefully. You should talk to them to make sure that they understand your treatment preferences and end-of-life decisions.

Your health care agent will generally have the power to make any medical choices you would have been able to make for yourself when you had the capacity to do so. Under North Carolina law, this includes decisions related to life-sustaining procedures, mental health treatments, anatomical gifts, and others. Their duty is to carry out the instructions in your advance directives and to act in your best interest where there are no instructions.

If you would prefer your health care directive to take priority over your agent’s choices, you can make this clear in your advance directives. Or, you have the option of allowing your health care agent to make choices that override the directions in your health care directive. This decision will largely be based on your personal preferences and your relationship with your health care agent.

In North Carolina, there are three types of medical conditions that can cause the provisions in your health care directive to become effective:

• An incurable or irreversible condition that will cause death in a short period of time
• Unconsciousness that is permanent to a high degree of medical certainty
• Advanced dementia or another condition that causes an irreversible loss of cognitive function

Your attending physician and another physician would need to verify the existence of one of these conditions before your health care directive can become operative.

In your document, you choose whether you would prefer the withholding of life-prolonging treatments under the above circumstances. Even if you would prefer not to receive heroic life-sustaining treatment under these conditions, you still have the option to request artificial hydration and/or nutrition as well as pain medication.

You have the right to change your mind about the choices in your advance directives at any time. Your mental and physical condition have no impact on your ability to change or revoke your choices.

If you would like to completely revoke your health care directive, you can do so in writing or through any other method that clearly conveys your intention to revoke. A good way of communicating your intention to revoke is by creating a new health care directive that revokes all prior ones.

You can create a new document and revoke your prior one with FindLaw. The process only takes about half an hour, and you don’t need to leave the comfort of home to complete it.

After you have revoked your health care directive or created a new one, you should be sure to destroy all copies of the old one, if possible. You then need to inform your health care agent, loved ones, and health care workers about these changes. It’s important that you notify your medical staff immediately so that they can update your medical records. They cannot be held liable for acting on the provisions in your advance directives if they were unaware of the revocation.

Finally, if you registered your advance directives with the Advance Health Care Directive Registry, you will need to file a removal form to notify them of your revocation.