Appointing someone to make medical decisions for you

Appointing someone to make medical decisions for you

by Jacqui Brauman

It used to be called a Medical Power of Attorney, but in Victoria it’s now called the Appointment of a Medical Treatment Decision Maker.

The document is effectively the same thing, given that you are appointing someone to make medical decisions for you if you can’t.

You might be in a situation where you temporarily can’t make a medical decision, or you may have declined or had some kind of emergency situation happen where you will never recover from. Using this document would allow someone to step in and make medical decisions for you, in either situation.

In terms of when the document comes into play, that’s really up to the doctors at the time who are working on you, or consulting with your family, as to whether they feel like they can get a medical decision from you or not. If they can’t get you to communicate and have you tell them what you want done, then they will turn to your family for that decision.

Why actually formally appoint someone with this document?

Your next of kin has certain decision-making rights. But who your next of kin is may not be clear.

The other thing is that if you don’t have this document done, then your next of kin can only consent to medical decisions.

They cannot refuse medical treatment without the document. 

If you’re fairly firm on certain beliefs around either refusing organ donation, refusing blood transfusions, or in a certain scenario wanting certain treatments to be refused, like life support and so on, you need someone who can actually make those decisions. That’s what this Appointment of a Medical Treatment Decision Maker document does.

If we help you prepare the document, it then sits dormant and (fingers crossed) it may never need to be used. But just in case of an emergency, it’s there.

You can have multiple people appointed, but in a cascading order. It’s preferably to have only one person at a time. So you might have three or four people on the document, and then they would work in a cascading way. So if the first person might be your husband or wife, but if they’re in the same accident with you, then the next person comes into play. But if they’re not contactable, then it’s the next person. And then when this person’s back contactable, it reverts back to that person again, and it reverts and it cascades back up to your top person when they’re available. So there hopefully is always someone that is on hand that has the power that they need to have.

You can put conditions in the document as well.