Advance Healthcare Planning

ADVANCE HEALTHCARE PLANNING

Advance Healthcare Planning

Navigating the uncertainties of progressive supranuclear palsy( PSP), corticobasal degeneration( CBD) or multiple system atrophy( MSA) can be overwhelming. Understanding your diagnosis and its potential symptoms, treatments and prognosis can influence how you make sense of your future and make decisions regarding your care.

Advance care directives are helpful tools for assisting you in defining and discussing your wishes for medical care. They also offer an opportunity to put in writing the care you want during medical emergencies, when seriously ill or at end-of-life, thereby helping someone to represent your choices when the time comes.

We hope that this resource will offer clarification on advance care directives and considerations to guide you in having open conversations with your support network and documenting your wishes.

Common advance care directives include:

• Healthcare Power of Attorney

• Designates and authorizes a proxy or agent to carry out your healthcare and life-support wishes in the event that you are not able to make or verbalize your own decisions.

• Names alternate or successor agents to make decisions, should the primary healthcare power of attorney not be able or willing or cannot be reached.

• The healthcare power of attorney is not the same as a financial power of attorney. You may choose a different person to act as your proxy for healthcare decisions than for financial decisions.

• Choose a healthcare power of attorney that you trust to carry out your wishes for care. Discuss this decision with them ahead of time to make sure they understand your wishes and are able and willing to perform this role if needed.

• It is ideal for your primary healthcare power of attorney to reside in the same state as you.

• Living Will for a Natural Death

• Documents a person’ s wishes about medical interventions when in terminal or very serious medical conditions and the person is unable to communicate, such as a coma or advanced dementia.

• Can help to guide your healthcare power of attorney on what life and death with dignity means to you under different circumstances.

• Because of the common word“ will,” a Living Will is sometimes confused with a Last Will and Testament. A Last Will and Testament communicates directives for division of personal effects and assets, rather than medical wishes.