BACKGROUND Advance directive law may compromise the clinical effectiveness of advance directives. PURPOSE To identify unintended legal consequences of advance directive law that may prevent patients from communicating end-of-life preferences. DATA SOURCES Advance directive legal statutes for all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia and English-language searches of LexisNexis, Westlaw...

OBJECTIVE Clinicians have raised concerns that psychiatric advance directives may be used to refuse all treatment. However, people writing psychiatric advance directives can explicitly state their reasoning underlying treatment decisions. This study examined whether patients' reasons for refusing treatment influenced clinician decision making about implementing psychiatric advance directives. ...

An advance directive gives patients the legal right to give or withhold consent to specific medical treatments prospectively. This provides them with some reassurance about the dying process being managed in accordance with their wishes. Apprehension could be further allayed if it were known that the legal status of advance directives was consistently applied across the NHS. Guidance on advance...

In New Zealand an advance directive can be either an oral statement or a written document. Such directives give individuals the opportunity to make choices about future medical treatment in the event they are cognitively impaired or otherwise unable to make their preferences known. All consumers of health care have the right to make an advance directive in accordance with the common law. When w...

Forty-three chronic in-center hemodialysis patients were asked about their knowledge, attitudes, and behavior towards advance directives. The survey collected patient demographic data and assessed attitudes, knowledge, and behavior towards advance directives by agreement or disagreement with statements. Sixty-six percent of patients did not know what a health care proxy was, and 42% did not kno...