An Advance Care Directive, also called a Living Will, is a legal document you create to express your wishes and desires for you healthcare. You create this directive in advance of any situation in which you were unconscious and would not be able express your wishes because you are in a coma or persistent vegetative state. For example, you might have significant head injuries from an accident. Recovery might not be possible without loss of speech or possibly the ability to walk on your own. As antother example, your might have been rendered unconscious by a severe disease such as covid, and the decision whether to entube you would need to be made.
In your advance care directive, you specify the types of health care and medical procedures you do or do not want applied to you. You can make very broad stipulations covering a wide range of conditions, or you can narrowly specify various conditions you might be in, and detail the proceedures you do or don't want applied in the various conditions. You may also indicate whether you do or don't want hospice care. And you may name people you do not want involved in your care. You may also specify whether you wish to donate any of your organs.
All 50 states and the District of Columbia have laws recognizing validly executed advance care directives. However, the details and regulations vary from state to state. Thus, you should create an advance care directive meeting the requirements of your home state. Here are several links to PDFs of the forms for Massachusetts:
To use any of these forms, open the form, print out the pdf, and follow the instructions for filling out the form. Then arrange for two people to
witness you signing the form. Then you should give a copy to your health care provider, as well as to the person you choose as your health care proxy. It is also a good idea to provide a copy to the hospital you normally use for care and most likely would arrive at under extreme circumstances.
Actuallly, you want to provide your Advance Care Planning form to your care provider and hospital together with your Health Care Proxy designation form, and also you HIPPA release. Go to
Note that there is no uniform procedure for recognizing directives across state lines. For this reason, if you expect to spend notable amounts of time in different states, it is wise to create and execute directives for each of the states in which you expect to spend significant time. Here are links to directories giving access to the regulations and standard directive formats for each of the states: