To increase the odds that emergency workers know who to contact if you can’t tell them, and what your care wishes are, suppose you’ve put a list of emergency contacts in your wallet and filed your living will and health care power of attorney (POA) with the state.

What else can you do?

Dee Betts, Director of Health Information Management (HIM) at Yavapai Regional Medical Center – also known as Medical Records – explained how to get your documents on file directly with the hospital.

If you go to the hospital for planned care, either for outpatient treatment or for a longer stay, bring a copy of your living will and your health care POA with you, and give them to the person who registers you, or to one of the nurses. They will make sure that these are scanned into your medical record.  You need to do this only once. 

Even if your visit is not planned, a loved one may be able to grab copies of these documents if you are home when an emergency occurs and you are waiting for the ambulance to come get you.

Suppose you don’t have a hospital stay planned?  You can still drop your documents off at the Health Information Management/medical records department during business hours any time.  Even if you’ve never been a patient at the hospital, they can create a medical record number for you and scan your documents into their files.

Jill Logan, RN, Director of Ethics at Yavapai Regional Medical Center, further explained that unless you’ve noted in the documents themselves that they are valid only within a certain range of dates, they remain in effect unless you revoke them.  If you are in the hospital at any point after these documents are put on file, hospital staff will ask you if they still apply.  If you arrive at the hospital unconscious, however, and no emergency contact can be reached, they will use the living will/advance directive on file (assuming that they don’t give an expiration date that has passed) to guide your care. 

Since in these circumstances that document may be the only “voice of the patient,” Logan noted, “the form becomes much more important during this time.”

For this reason, it’s important to keep notes for yourself about which doctors, hospitals, and other organizations you’ve given copies of your documents to so that you know who to send updated versions to if your wishes or the individual you’ve chosen to speak for you when you can’t speak for yourself ever changes. 

Yavapai Regional Medical Center offers free copies of advance directive forms, available at the front desk in the lobbies of both the east and west campuses.