WELCOME!!

This site offers you and other members of your family an essential tool for your health-care security – a downloadable Advance Health-care Directive.  If you do not have an Advance Health-care Directive as part of your estate plan, please DON’T leave this site without downloading it and executing it today. 

     As an adult in Mississippi, you are the only person entitled by law to make your own medical treatment and health-care decisions, and maintain the privacy of your personal medical information, unless you give someone else legal authority to do so.  This includes the right to begin, alter and refuse medical treatment.  However, one may lose this capacity through illness or injury, and doctors or other medical providers may be reluctant to render treatment without consent of someone with lawful authority to approve such measures.  The Uniform Health-Care Decisions Act of Mississippi (MCA §41-41-201) prescribes the “Advance Health-Care Directive” as the instrument by which you, while you have mental capacity, can name one or more agents who will be able to make health-care decisions for you if you are unable to do so.  Executing a health-care directive will ensure that, in the event you become incapacitated and need health care or medical treatment, the person most trusted to make such decisions for you will have been named and given any written guidance or instructions based on your personal values.    

This site has been established for your use as part of the inaugural Mississippi Healthcare Decisions Day on Wednesday April 16, 2008.  As part of the recognition of this event, hospitals, nursing homes and other health-care facilities listed on the site have participated in “spreading the word” and assisting people in their communities with the advance health-care directive.  We on the Mississippi Healthcare Decisions Day Committee extend our sincere thanks to all such facilities, and the many health-care professionals who work in them, for their help and support. 

You have a choice about your health care!!  Please take a few moments to download the Advance Health-care Directive from this site, fill it out according to your personal wishes and instructions, and sign it in keeping with the witness and/or notary instructions at the end.  You will then rest easy knowing that your future medical treatment and care will be carried out as you wish in the event of future incapacity.