Advance Directives
Contact Information
Phone: (650) 723-1303
Fax: (650) 736-4186
Location:
Aging Adult Services
1101 Welch Road, C-1
Palo Alto, CA 94304-5362
Aging Adult Services offers a FREE confidential meeting with a trained professional to help you understand and formulate your Advance Directive.
Advance Directives serve several interests of patients should they become unable to make their own decisions by:
- Protecting the moral and legal right of self-determination
- Diminishing uncertainty about what a patient would want done
- Reducing conflict among decision makers
- Relieving the anxiety of families and care givers about making end of life decisions and patients' fears about over treatment
- Facilitating altruism by allowing patients to donate organs or to relieve their families of the economic burdens of unnecessary treatment
(Edmund D. Pellegrino, MD, JAMA, July 15, 1992-Vol 268, No. 3 page 354)