Project Description
Ensure Your Advance Directive Does What You Want It To Do
ADVANCE DIRECTIVES
Advance Directives (also known as Living Wills or Advance Decisions) are legal documents that can help you to ensure your ongoing well-being is taken care of when you cannot do so yourself.
This is because an Advance Directive allows you to specify what actions may be taken regarding their health if you are unable to make decisions in this area for yourself due to your illness or other health-related incapacity.
The Mental Capacity Act 2005 provides you may make an Advance Directive so decisions may be made for you regarding your health-related issues that may arise in the future. Principally, an Advance Directive means that you can refuse particular medical treatment when you lack mental capacity to do so yourself.
To be legally binding upon those that would provide you with medical treatment then your Advance Directive needs to be specific about the treatment to be refused and when that refusal is to apply. Moreover, for you Advance Directive to be valid, it is necessary for you to be mentally competent under the Mental Capacity Act 2005, to have been an adult and understood the decision when you signed it.
Therefore, if you are based in Essex and are considering whether an Advance Directive is for you, then you need to contact Andrew Douglas Wills and Legal Services today for more information.
The need to seek professional advice to produce your Advance Directive is then only further emphasised where you want to refuse life-prolonging treatment. This is because this kind of decision needs to be recorded both in writing and witnessed by an independent third party.
Then, as has already been stated, any Advance Directive regarding the refusal of life-prolonging treatment is legally binding so long as you are an adult and were both properly competent and informed when coming to your decision.