[WSBAPT] Advance Directives Question - Answered

[Eric Reutter]

Hello and good morning,

I had posted a question yesterday about the role of health care providers
when their policies conflicted with compliance with a patient's advance
directive, and there was no POA, surrogate decision maker, or guardian
appointed.

I am grateful to say that my question has been answered in detail by a
practitioner who helpfully explained to me that, in these types of
situations, the health care provider will petition for a guardian to be
appointed, which usually results in the appointment of a guardianship
agency (if there are no close friends/associates willing to be guardian)

This result essentially eliminates the narrow situation I was envisioning,
and it seems to be that, if a guardian agency were trying to enforce an
advance directive, and the policies of a health care provider conflicted
with the advance directive, then the health care provider would have an
obligation under WAC 182-501-0125 to transfer the patient to a facility who
could honor the directive. This result seems to eliminate any potential
statutory ambiguity or any potential injustice for patients.

Thanks to this forum, and the help of the practitioner, I am saved further
research, and now have no excuse to continue drafting my article. Thank you!

Eric Reutter

Tax LLM Candidate 2016
University of Washington School of Law
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/wsbapt/attachments/20151022/bad1dc41/attachment.html>