An Advance Health Directive is a document that contains your decisions about future medical, surgical and dental treatment and other health care.

You can make an Advance Health Directive in which you either provide consent, or refuse consent, to future treatment.  For example, you may say you want or do not want certain treatment.

Treatment is any medical, surgical or dental treatment or other health care (including palliative care and life sustaining measures such as assisted ventilation and cardiopulmonary resuscitation).

• A treatment decision is a decision to consent or refuse consent to the commencement or continuation of any treatment.
• A treatment decision operates only in the circumstances that you specify.
• Treatment to which you consent in this Advance Health Directive can be provided to you.
• Treatment to which you refuse consent in your Advance Health Directive cannot be provided to you.

An Advance Health Directive comes into effect only if you are unable to make reasonable judgments about a treatment decision at the time that the treatment is required.  In these circumstances, the Advance Health Directive acts as your ‘voice’.

You are permitted to limit the Advance Health Directive to dealing with the difficult decision whether your life is to be maintained if it is entirely reliant on life support machines with no prospect of recovering your normal faculties.

It is also possible for the document to be more comprehensive, for example to limit particular procedures or treatments.