Advanced directives, DNR & POLST (Part I)

Process for health care, living will, DNR, Polst, post, advanced directives … These terms can be confusing, but it is important that everyone understands them. You will find below some simple definitions of the terminology of prior directives.

Advanced directives
An umbrella term for many types of documents related to the provision of future health care decisions for patients. Anticipated guidelines include proxy for forms of health care, forms of treatment (POST) and doctors’ controls for forms of life treatment (POLST) and living will.

Proximity for the form of health care
The most common and most distant prior directive. It allows the patient to appoint an agent to make health care decisions for them when he is unable to do so, in all circumstances. The filling of this form must be preceded by the planning of advanced care.

Advanced care planning
A facilitated discussion that encourages the patient to express the health care decisions they would take in the future according to their own objectives, values ​​and personal beliefs in a variety of circumstances; And then the sharing of these decisions with the agent they have chosen, as well as their family and health providers.

Polst shape
Sometimes called post in other states. This form converts patient decisions into doctors’ orders. It is intended to be used in the late stages of the disease limiting the life of a patient, fragile elderly people and the person who expects the doctor to die in one year. He gives explicit advice to health professionals on how to take care of the patient when the POA-HC is not immediately present.

Willing will
This form indicates to health caregivers which survival treatments that a patient does not want when they have an incurable and irreversible injury, illness or illness judged as a terminal state by their attending physician, who determined that their death is imminent. It is not as advanced as Poa-HC or Polst / Post forms.

Last update: November 5, 2018