The Georgia Advance Directive for Health Care (“Advance Directive”) is a fairly new document designed by the Georgia Legislature to combine and refine two separate legal documents that were formerly necessary to declare a person’s wishes regarding artificial life support. The Advance Directive is created when a person is healthy, but it is made to be used when a person is incapacitated, gravely ill, injured, when death is imminent, or any time when a person is unable to make his or her own decisions and is in need of medical care. Modern medicine is often capable of keeping a person technically “alive” indefinitely with artificial life support treatments, even when that person is injured beyond any hope for recovery. In many such cases, physicians are not permitted to make the decision to remove life support from a person. The decision whether to allow a person to die then falls to one’s closest family members, if any are available. This decision can be overwhelming for your loved ones, adding unnecessary guilt and pain to their grief.
The Advance Directive accomplishes three important legal results in one document, where separate legal documents were formerly required for each one. First, it allows you to appoint a person to carry out health care decisions for you if you were ever to become unable to make your own decision for some reason. Second, it allows you to direct medical providers in advance to withhold or withdraw certain forms of artificial life support under certain circumstances. These two legal acts used to require creation of a “living will” and a “durable power of attorney.” Now, the Advance Directive makes separate documents unnecessary.
Third, the Advance Directive law allows you to use the same document to appoint the person who you would want to act as your Guardian, if a court determined that you were unable to manage your own affairs. A Guardian is a person who manages all of your basic affairs if you are incapacitated, including your financial decisions. Under ordinary circumstances, a court would appoint a guardian of its own choice, based on its own determinations. With the Advance Directive, you make the decision. You may decide to appoint the same person that you appointed for your health care decisions, or to appoint some other person.
With an Advance Directive, you can make several key decisions about what is to happen if you are ever so injured or ill as to become incapacitated. Rather than leaving it to your loved ones to make emotional choices about your life-sustaining medical treatments, the Advance Directive allows you to take the wise and prudent course of declaring your wishes in a written document, relieving your loved ones of the obligation to face such a difficult decision.
No one likes to talk about or plan for the case of a tragic event or traumatic injury. The Advance Directive is a very important part of basic estate planning and should not be taken lightly. Let Slatter Law prepare and put in place the appropriate legal documents to take this decision out of the hands of your family members and love ones.
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