Tampa Health Care Surrogate Lawyer

Our Tampa health care surrogate lawyers can help you draft the legal documents you need to be sure that your health care decisions are being made by the person you want making them if you are ever incapacitated.  This can be an incapacitation at the end of life, or it can be a potentially temporary incapacitation.  The key is that one has to think about these decisions ahead of time and make sure all of the proper paperwork is in order, and our Tampa health care surrogate lawyers can help you do just that.

Experienced Tampa Estate Planning Lawyers

As estate planning attorneys, health care surrogate work is a natural extension of our practice.  We have spent decades helping people like you ensure that at the end of their lives their wishes are followed when it comes to the distribution of their financial assets.  Part of that process is picking the right person to act as an executor or trustee, depending on what sorts of estate planning tools you use.  If you are taking steps to make sure your financial matters are handled by the right person when you can no longer handle them yourself, why would you not also make sure your health care decisions are being made by the right person for that job?

What is a Health Care Surrogate Under Florida Law?

A health care surrogate is a person you designate to make all of your health care decisions if you ever become incapacitated, that is, unable to make health care decisions for yourself.  Under Florida law your health care surrogate will have a duty to consult with the appropriate health care providers (usually the doctors who are treating you or would be treating you) before he or she makes any decisions.  The health care surrogate is charged not with making the decision he or she would want made if he or she were in your circumstances, but instead he or she is required to make the decision he or she believes you would make if you were able to do so.  To this end it is important that you pick a person who:

• You have discussed your health care wishes with; and
• Who you believe would be able to put his or her own wishes and feelings aside and instead follow your wishes.

If a situation arises where a health care surrogate is faced with a medical care question that he or she simply has no way of knowing how you would respond to, he or she is not without options.  Imagine for example that you are incapacitated and a doctor suggests an experimental treatment that you never could have imagined as a possibility.  In these cases the health care surrogate is allowed to make whatever decision he or she believes to be in your best interest.  Additionally, you can appoint an “alternate” health care surrogate as a backup just in case your primary health care surrogate is unable to make the hard decisions when he or she finds him or herself actually being asked to do so.

Contact Our Tampa Health Care Surrogate Lawyers

When you are doing your end of life planning it is important to make sure that your health care wishes will be followed.  That is why you need the help of a Tampa health care surrogate lawyer, contact the offices of Bubley & Bubley, P.A.  You can reach us at 813-454-0261 or you can find our office at 12960 N Dale Mabry Hwy, Tampa, FL 33618.