Advanced Care Planning
Advanced Care Planning is a process of planning for future medical care in case you are unable to make your own decisions. It is a continual process and not merely a document or an isolated event.
Advanced Care Planning includes Advance Directives such as:
- Health Care Proxy
- Living Will
- Do Not Resuscitate (DNR)
The ASCW does not require you have Advance Directives prior to your surgical procedure.
Health Care Proxy
The New York Health Care Proxy Law allows you to appoint someone you trust as your health care agent—for example, a family member or a close friend—to make health care decisions for you if you lose the ability to make decisions yourself.
- By appointing a health care agent, you can make sure that health care providers follow your wishes. Your agent can also decide how your wishes apply as your medical condition changes.
- Hospitals, physicians and other health care providers must follow your agent’s decisions as if they were your own.
- You may give the person you select as your health care agent as little or as much authority as you want. You may allow your agent to make all health care decisions or only certain ones.
- You may also give your agent instructions that he or she has to follow.
- A health care proxy may also be used to document your wishes or instructions with regard to organ and/or tissue donation.
Living Will
A Living Will lets you state your wishes about medical care in the event that you develop an irreversible condition that prevents you from making your own medical decisions. The Living Will becomes effective if you become terminally ill, permanently unconscious or minimally conscious due to brain damage and will never regain the ability to make decisions. Persons who want to indicate under what set of circumstances they favor or object to receiving any specific treatments should complete a living will.
Do Not Resuscitate (DNR)
A DNR order tells medical professionals not to perform CPR. This means that physicians, nurses and emergency medical personnel will not attempt emergency cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) if the patient’s breathing or heart beat stops.
DNR orders are ordinarily intended to apply to situations where the dying process cannot be reversed and where respiratory and/or cardiac arrest are natural manifestations of imminent death.
Further information on Advance Care Planning may be obtained
- Online at CompassionAndSupport.org
- From your Primary Care Physician
- From the Ambulatory Surgery Center of Westchester
Advanced Directives at the ASCW
Health Care Proxy
The ASCW will honor a Health Care Proxy Advance Directive if provided by the patient upon admission on the day of surgery.
Living Will
A Living Will addresses specific treatment desires when a person has an irreversible condition. If the patient provides the ASCW with a Living Will and a severe adverse event occurs requiring the patient to be transferred to the hospital, the patient’s Living Will will be provided to the receiving facility.
Do Not Resuscitate (DNR)
Irregular heartbeats, low blood pressure and respiratory depression are known potential side effects of the anesthetic medications and not necessarily a natural sign of impending death. Therefore, the ASCW will not honor a DNR Advance Directive.