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Life Care Planning: Make your health care wishes known in advance

If you experience a medical emergency* and you are unable to communicate, are your health care wishes known to your family and doctors?

Kaiser Permanente’s Life Care Planning program can help you to outline your health care preferences at different stages in your life. From creating a written plan and designating a health care agent who can speak for you, to outlining specific wishes about treatment options, Life Care Planning helps to ensure your values, beliefs, and goals will be followed in the event that you cannot communicate for yourself.

Life Care Planning is a multi-stage process, meant to be revisited as often as desired:

  1. My Values: First Steps is appropriate for all adults. It involves selecting a health care agent (someone designated to make decisions on your behalf) and identifying your values and goals to help make future health care decisions.
  2. My Choices: Next Steps is for people with chronic, progressive illness who have begun to experience a functional decline or more frequent hospitalizations. At this stage, you will explore your values and wishes in more detail, including preparing your health care agent to speak on your behalf.
  3. My Care: Advanced Steps is intended for the frail, the elderly, or those with advanced illness. This final stage will help outline your choices at the end of your life.

To learn more, you’re invited to attend one of our Life Care Planning classes. Each two-hour session will show how to apply your values to your health care decisions, walk you through the “First Steps” stage and help you complete an Advance Directive form. We recommend you bring a family member or the person you think will serve as your health care agent.

There is no fee for this class, and it is open to Kaiser Permanente members and the community.

For more information, download a flyer with class dates, or call one of our Health Education Centers:

Manteca: 209-824-5070
Modesto: 209-735-6060
Stockton: 209-476-3299
Tracy: 209-839-6130

*Emergency Medical Condition: A medical condition manifesting itself by acute symptoms of sufficient severity (including severe pain) such that a reasonable person would have believed that the absence of immediate medical attention would result in any of the following:

  • Placing the person’s health (or, with respect to a pregnant woman, the health of the woman or her unborn child) in serious jeopardy
  • Serious impairment to bodily functions
  • Serious dysfunction of any bodily organ or part

A mental health condition is an Emergency Medical Condition when it meets the requirements of the paragraph above, or when the condition manifests itself by acute symptoms of sufficient severity such that either of the following is true:

  • The person is an immediate danger to himself or herself or to others
  • The person is immediately unable to provide for, or use, food, shelter, or clothing, due to the mental disorder