Advanced Directives: Communicating your healthcare choices

Individuals usually make decisions regarding their health care treatment after their physician recommends a course of treatment and provides information about the treatment. These decisions may become more difficult, however, if a patient becomes unable to tell their doctors and loved ones what kind of health care treatment they want. Through documents, known as advance directives, individuals can express their treatment preferences before they actually need such care, ensuring that their wishes will be carried out and that their families and others will not be faced with making these difficult decisions.
Our Personal Choices booklet will give you some basic facts about your rights as a patient. Additional information may be obtained from your physician or nurse or visit the U.S. Living Will Registry.

A Little History
Since the early 1970s, many cases involving the use of life support systems have gone before the courts. The main questions surrounding each case were: 1) whether the life support systems served to prolong life or to prolong suffering prior to inevitable death and 2) whose right was it to decide whether to continue or withdraw particular therapies.

A 1980 Presidential Commission recognized that each of us is unique and that decisions will vary from person to person. They may be based upon a combination of factors, including the lifestyle you lead, your religious or moral views, and upon past experiences. The commission emphasized that it is your right as a patient to be adequately informed of your choices by your physician and to decide what type of medical treatment you wish to receive. Decisions to accept or reject life-sustaining therapies must be made voluntarily by competent and informed patients, or if the patient is unable or incompetent, by another appropriately informed person acting on the patient’s behalf.

At Hendrick Health System
Our policies mandate that every step be taken for the preservation of life and alleviation of suffering. Every Hendrick patient will receive total life support, including CPR, unless a decision not to resuscitate (to revive from apparent death) has been previously made. This is called a “No Code” order and is made only after thoughtful discussion between the physician, the competent patient and any others involved in the decision-making process. It is the physician’s responsibility to inform those involved of the patient’s diagnosis and likelihood of recovery