Living Wills
1. Do I have the right to refuse medical treatment?
Each individual has the right to refuse medical treatment if that individual has the information necessary to make that decision. This means that a medical provider cannot treat a person (except in an emergency) without the person’s consent after that person has been told of the advantages and disadvantages of the proposed treatment.
2. What if I become incapacitated?
What happens, however, if a person does not have the capacity to make a decision or give informed consent to medical treatment because he or she is incompetent or comatose? With regard to the refusal of life-sustaining treatment, New Jersey law provides that if a person has expressed his or her wishes in an advance directive for medical care, those wishes will be respected by the doctor or other medical provider.
If you wish to make your medical preferences known now, when you are competent, so that your wishes will be known should you be unable to express them yourself, you should consider putting them in writing through an advance directive for healthcare. An advance directive may be either a living will or a durable power of attorney for medical care or a combination of both.
3. What is a living will?
A living will is a statement of the medical treatment you want or do not want if you should become incompetent and unable to communicate those preferences yourself. A durable power of attorney for medical care, also called a proxy directive, is a document in which you designate someone trustworthy to make those health decisions for you should you become unable to make them yourself. You should discuss your medical care preferences at length with any person or persons you choose as your proxy decision maker.
You may wish to have a document combining both your living will and proxy directive. In that document, you may state your medical preferences but provide that a proxy decision maker should be consulted if there is any confusion over your wishes or you have not considered a medical technology that was unavailable when your medical directive was written.
You must give your advance directive to your attending physician or the medical institution caring for you. Your advance directive will be used when your attending physician determines you lack the capacity to make a medical decision and a second doctor confirms that opinion.
If you have provided so in your advance directive, life sustaining treatment will be withdrawn only if you are permanently unconscious and your condition is terminal.
It may also be withdrawn if you have a serious irreversible illness. Your physician may also issue a do not resuscitate order based on your advance directive.
If you have an advance directive but change your mind, perhaps at a hospital, you may revoke your directive orally or by creating a new advance directive encompassing your most recent wishes.
Although the law does not require that advance directives be drawn and executed by attorneys, as does New Jersey law regarding wills, it is, nevertheless, prudent to consult an attorney for those important decisions so that there will be no question or doubt about your document when it is needed. Advance directives must be signed in the presence of two witnesses or in the presence of a notary.
For free copies of advance directive forms, contact the New Jersey Division on Aging, CN 807, Trenton, NJ 08625 or call the New Jersey Division of Senior Affairs Information, Referral and Assistance Service at 1-877-222-3737.
