Lakeview Surgery Center supports and promotes the principle that adults have the right to refuse or accept medical treatment. We recognize the right of adult patients to execute an advance directive. Advance directives are documents that enable you to make decisions now about your medical care in the future. They offer guidance to your family and your doctors when you are not able to speak for yourself. Two types are legal and available in Iowa: The Durable Power of Attorney for Health Care (allows you to choose and name someone to make health care decisions for you when you can not) and The Living Will (a document directing your doctor to withhold or withdraw certain treatments that could prolong the dying process). Advance directives help to ensure that your values and important wishes are carried out. Our center can provide you with information to prepare an advance directive, or you may access this information on our website. If you already have an advance directive, bring it with you on the day of your procedure. This statement lets the doctors and nurses know the treatment you wish to receive or the name or names of persons who can be contacted to make health care decisions for you if you can not speak for yourself. An advance directive becomes operative when an individual becomes unable to make health care decisions. This situation would rarely occur at Lakeview Surgery Center because we are an outpatient facility that does low-risk elective cases. The potential complications explained to you by your physician and the anesthesiologist would almost always be reversible. Therefore, if in a rare instance a complication would occur that might prove to be irreversible, that patient would be transferred to a facility that is able to give that patient a higher level of care. The advance directive would be sent to that facility with the patient so it can be incorporated into the care plan for that patient.
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