Knowing a loved one’s wishes before a medical emergency can turn impossible decisions into acts of care.

An advance directive for the state where you live may not be effective in another state. Some states have provisions that respect out-of-state directives as long as they conform to the requirements of ...

States generally allow a person (principal) to appoint another person (agent) to make health care decisions, receive protected health information, or both on the principal’s behalf. In many states, ...

While advance directives are quite common for patients with physical impairments, advance directives for people with mental impairments are controversial. In many countries, including Germany, there ...

Jennifer Lagemann is a former family caregiver, as well as a professional caregiver and administrator at home care agencies. She works as a writer and researcher, helping care providers create patient ...

Advance directives enable individuals to exercise control over their futures and ensure that the care they receive at the end of their lives is pursuant to their wishes. Yet, the majority of ...

An advance directive is a legally binding document regulated by state laws. Advance directives are subject to The Patient Self-Determination Act (PSDA), 1990, a federal law that encourages individuals ...

Julia Kagan is a financial/consumer journalist and former senior editor, personal finance, of Investopedia. Ebony Howard is a certified public accountant and a QuickBooks ProAdvisor tax expert. She ...

The article by Drs-Blackmer and Ross on ‘Awareness and use of Advance Directives in the Spinal Cord Injured Population’ (Spinal Cord 2002; 40: 581–594) highlights the importance of health-care advance ...

On this episode of Social Distance, James Hamblin and Katherine Wells talk with Edo Banach, the president and CEO of the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization. They discuss how to create ...

There are a number of assumptions that the legitimacy of a particular application of an advance directive appears to operate under. First, there is the assumption that the author of the advance ...

It’s a common hope that most people share: that their end-of-life wishes will be respected if something happened and they couldn’t make their own health care decisions. Yet only about a third of ...