Health Care Directives

Los Angeles Trust Attorney Providing Reliable Legal Counsel

As you enter your golden years, you will need to start taking steps to ensure that your health will be maintained and that you will be cared for, even after you become incapacitated for one reason or another. Using a health care directive is a great way to ensure that your wishes and medical requirements are met and respected.

If you are thinking about setting up your own health care directive as part of your trust, you can come to the Law Offices of David A. Shapiro, P.C. for assistance. Attorney Shapiro has earned board certification in both trust law and probate law, giving him an advantage over many others in his field. For his clients, this specialization allows him to approach each case with insight, creativity, and efficiency, putting to rest any concerns they may have had about health care directives as a whole.

Making Sense of Advanced Health Care Directives

In the state of California, people are permitted to create health care directives, documents that tell others how they would wish to receive medical care should they become incapacitated, at essentially any time in their lives. For many people who create health care directives, they do so in full understanding that the natural aging process will eventually render them unable to fully take care of themselves. For others, the possibility of suffering a devastating accident or becoming comatose due to illness prompts them to take legal action sooner than later. Whatever your reason for wanting to create a health care directive in advance, it is always to your advantage to begin before much time passes.

You will need to consider what medical attention and treatments you want to receive in case of an emergency, such as:

• CPR or defibrillation
• Surgery or organ transplant
• Medication and painkiller usage
• Artificial respiration (Iron Lung)

Creating a health care directive does not always pertain to telling medical practitioners what lifesaving techniques to use on you when you are incapacitated or rendered unable to respond. Instead, it can be used to clearly state what should not be done to save your life. This is crucial to point out, for it can allow family members to feel at peace when they would have otherwise felt guilt.

Choosing an Agent for Your Directive

You may wish to select an agent to take control of your health care directive. This individual, who can be selected through the use of a durable power of attorney, will be charged with ensuring that your final wishes are respected. In combination, your health care directive and the durable power of attorney come together to form an advanced health care directive. When do so correctly, this new documentation will serve as “law” for your final care, and doctors and your agent must follow it as closely as they can.

Trustworthy Legal Counsel for Your Trust Needs

When we say that you can trust our Los Angeles trust attorney, it is not just a clever play on words, it is a promise to you. At our law firm, we want to do all we can to guide our clients through complicated legal processes regarding trusts, wills, probate, and more.

Tell us about your health care directive plans during a free initial consultation and we can take it from there.