One step forward for advance directives in Hong Kong.

In the context of end-of-life clinical care decisions, it is true that all mentally competent patients can make these decisions for themselves. However, patients’ conditions may decline so that they become mentally incompetent in their terminal illnesses. The latter scenario is fairly common. For example, Silveira et al1 found 30% of the older adults who required decision making at the end of life lacked decision-making capacity.