Saturday, September 12, 2009

Five Wishes

Just found out about this website, Aging with Dignity

They offer a living will written in everyday language, and they call it Five Wishes—because it helps you lay out your five wishes about end-of-life care.

*Who you want to make healthcare decisions for you when you can't make them
*The kind of medical treatment you want or don't want
*How comfortable you want to be
*How you want people to treat you
*What you want your loved ones to know

If you're looking to fill out your own living will, this is a very accessible resource. Please note, it meets the legal requirements in 40 states. But, the site also has a handy little map to show which states accept this form. Link to it here

5 comments:

Judy K. Underwood, Ph.D. said...

Thank you Jessica for letting others know about "Five Wishes." More people need to know that it's possible to have a pain-free, peaceful passing. They can overcome the fear of dying, die a natural death with dignity and discover the Passing Peacefully Bill of Rights. There are more resources and links for people at www.passingpeacefully.com

Anonymous said...

As a Hospice and Palliative Care provider "5 Wishes" is the best! I recommend it to everyone that wants to know what is the best way to make their needs known at the end of life.

Gail Rae said...

Oh, wow, I should have been reading forwards instead of backwards. This sounds like what my mother and I tried to do regarding DNRs but with added concerns. I especially like the last two concerns addressed in Five Wishes. Cool!
Although the website sells copies of Five Wishes for $5.00 apiece and has other products that tie into the document for up to $40.95, I discovered that the preview of the form appears to be a complete document and would certainly be serviceable if someone wanted to design their own Five Wishes form. The preview includes instructions on how to legally activate the form and special instructions per state, if applicable. Out of curiosity I decided to attempt to save it off the pdf webpage that came up with I clicked into the preview. It saved nicely and came up complete in Adobe Reader without reverting to the internet.

Gail Rae said...

Hello again, Jessica!
Just wanted to mention that, after reading this post and clicking into the website with the Five Wishes Advance Directive I became so intrigued and thought so much about it that I decided to do a little more research, a lot more thinking and write about it over at my website, giving title credit to your website.
Your readers might be interested in my post about the document, especially the end entitled Important Amendment. It lists links to and short summaries of five online articles that contain some interesting critiques of the document.

Carol Alley, MD said...

Advanced directives are so very important!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FX9IWJTyH_U&feature=youtube_gdata_player