Wednesday, April 16, is National Health Care Decisions Day – a day set aside to encourage everyone to ponder these questions: If you were in the hospital, who would make decisions for you – and what would you want those decisions to be?
Amanda Altobell, director of ethics at Mercy Springfield, said advance directives help ensure that your wishes are known. She encourages anyone 18 and older to fill one out.
"My role exists in the hospital oftentimes because patients don't have advance directives," she said, "and then you're trying to navigate, what would the patient want in this scenario? What's in their best interest?"
She also points out that, if a loved one doesn’t have an advance directive, you might end up having to make one of the most difficult decisions of your life.
"I see time and time again, especially at end of life, loved ones don't know what their loved ones wanted, so family members are stuck making these decisions that are life altering," she said, "and they've never had a conversation with their loved one about what they would want. And there's a lot of distress on the family of, am I doing the right thing? You know, am I advocating for them? I don't know what they would want here. So it also just eliminates the confusion and a lot of the distress that will happen to your loved ones if you don't have one."
And, she said, while some states use a hierarchy system, meaning those closest to the patient, such as a spouse, make the final decision, Missouri is a consensus state, and all family members must come to an agreement, which is often difficult to do.
There are two parts of an advance directive, according to Altobell. The first part names who you want to be your decision maker when you can’t make your own decisions. The second part lays out what your medical wishes are for treatment.
You can download an advance directive at mercy.net or from the Missouri Bar Association at missourilawyershelp.org. CoxHealth also offers an advance directive on its website, coxhealth.com. And so does CMH in Bolivar at citizensmemorial.com.
Those are legal in the state of Missouri, according to Altobell. They just require two witnesses and a notary. Mercy offers a notary for free to its patients who wish to fill out an advance directive.
Altobell encourages everyone to have conversations about end of life care now.
"I would say it's so much better to have these conversations early, even if they seem a bit morbid, than to wait, potentially thinking in the future there will be a better option," she said. "I have a lot of people who say, you know, we do this over dinner and it's, you know, death over dinner or it's something where we all sit around and we talk about what we would want, what we wouldn't want. It can seem morbid, but it actually leads to way better outcomes for the patient and the family."
