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
Authorization to Consent to Treatment of Unemancipated Minor
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 It is a written declaration that tells whether you want life-sustaining procedures to be withheld or withdrawn if, at some future time, you are terminally ill and either unconscious or otherwise incompetent to decide whether any medical procedure or intervention should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:
- Which person you want to make health care decisions for you when you can't make them
- The kind of medical treatment you want or don't want
- How comfortable you want to be
- How you want people to treat you
- 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.
Authorization to Consent to Treatment of Unemancipated Minor
A parent or legal guardian may want to consider providing written authorization for another person to give consent in advance for medical treatment for a minor child if you are not available to consent to care. This person could be a relative, a neighbor, a babysitter or other person designated by the parent(s) or legal guardian. An Authorization to Consent to Treatment of Unemancipated Minor Form can be used for this purpose. A copy of the written authorization should be retained by the person acting as your agent for your child and presented to the health care provider at time of treatment.
