The new Lasting Powers of Attroney signal the end of the much aclaimed Living Wills (also known as Advance Directives), but do they? If you can’t nominate someone to make these decisions as your attorney, you might still need an old style Living Will to give doctors guidance.
The new Lasting Power of Attorney (LPA), Personal Welfare, takes over from where Living Wills left off, but this time with complete legal backing from the Mental Capacity Act which means that they are legally valid whereas Living Wills (Advance Directives) were backed by the BMA, but not necessarily through the courts.
Doctors now have a legally enforceable document that can stipulate the patient’s request should they reach a situation where they cannot make their own health decisions – perhaps in a coma, for example.
This is how the new document describes the situation:
LIFE-SUSTAINING TREATMENT Your attorney(s) cannot make decisions about life-sustaining treatment for you unless you expressly state that in your LPA. Life-sustaining treatment means any treatment that a doctor considers necessary to sustain your life. Life-sustaining treatment is not a category of treatment. Whether or not a treatment is life-sustaining will depend on the circumstances of a particular situation. Some treatments will be life-sustaining in some situations, but not in others; the important factor is if the treatment is needed to keep you alive.
You get to choose in advance, one of the following:
I want to give my attorney(s) authority to give or refuse consent to life-sustaining treatment on my behalf
or
I do not want to give my attorney(s) authority to give or refuse consent to life-sustaining treatment on my behalf
In separate notes you can give further guidance and be specific where you want.
The most usual question we get asked about this type of legal document is whether this amounts to euthanasia. No it doesn’t. You can’t use a legal document to end your life, but you can give guidance for doctors to not prolong your life if there is no hope. There is a clear distinction between the two.
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