Health and Welfare Lasting Power of Attorney
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Health & Welfare Lasting Power of Attorney
Ian Winterbotham is back, this time to talk about a Health & Welfare Lasting Power of Attorney (LPA).
What is a Health & Welfare Lasting Power of Attorney?
The first thing to say is that there are two types of Lasting Powers of Attorney, also known as LPAs. The first is a Property & Finance Lasting Power of Attorney, and it deals with your property and financial assets. We’ll address this in a separate podcast.
Separate to that is a Health & Welfare Lasting Power of Attorney. It’s a legal document where you, as the donor, appoint someone you trust to make decisions on your behalf regarding health treatments and personal care, in the event you should lose the mental capacity to make those decisions for yourself.
A Health & Welfare LPA allows a trusted person – your attorney – to speak as if they are you, but only if you are unable to express yourself in any way at all.
What decisions can a Health & Welfare Lasting Power of Attorney make. What decisions can they not make?
In addition to decisions about health treatments and personal care, the attorney might be involved in decisions related to daily routines such as washing, dressing, eating, medical care and other aspects of the donor’s wellbeing.
They can’t make decisions about finance and property unless you have allowed that through the other type of Lasting Power of Attorney.
Who can be a Health & Welfare attorney?
Anyone who is 18 years or older and has mental capacity to make decisions can be appointed as a Health & Welfare attorney.
What happens if I don’t have a Health & Welfare Lasting Power of Attorney?
Well, imagine yourself in a few decades time. You might be getting a little bit confused, and you could be vulnerable to decisions being made by a third party.
Someone you don’t really know could be making decisions about your long-term care, and that could have a knock-on effect on where you live and whether you continue living in your own home.
That’s one example. There must be hundreds of others, but it’s a really powerful one, isn’t it?
What if the donor is refusing or consenting to treatment? What options do I have?
If you’re the attorney, you must allow the donor to make their own decisions. If they can express themselves in any way, you are not legally entitled to override them.
What can I use the donor’s money for?
This presupposes that you are registered as an attorney under a Property & Finance LPA. In that case, you can use the donor’s money for their care and medical expenses, for any other expenses or items that might make them more comfortable, or regular birthday presents to nephews and nieces, etc.
But the donor’s money must always be used for the benefit of the donor. The idea is that it’s what the donor would have wanted. It’s not there for you to make decisions unilaterally about what the money should be used for.
How do I get a Health & Welfare Lasting Power of Attorney? How do I become one?
If the donor chooses you as an attorney and makes an application to the Office of the Public Guardian, we can discuss your options and take your instructions.
We will then prepare the application and send the document for you to sign. One of our consultants can also act as a certificate provider, which makes the application process easier.
After you, the attorneys and the certificate provider have all signed, we can send the document to the Office of the Public Guardian to be registered.
How much does it cost to set up a Health & Welfare Lasting Power of Attorney?
We would charge £350 plus a fee of £82 for a single Lasting Power of Attorney. Then you need to budget for a further registration fee of £82 for each Lasting Power of Attorney.
You might also want to instruct the Property & Finance Lasting Power of Attorney at the same time. In that case we could do the two documents for £550 plus VAT together, with further registration fees of £164.
What else do we need to know about a Health & Welfare Lasting Power of Attorney?
Well, this is a very brief guide and I hope it’s helpful in giving an initial understanding of what a Health & Welfare LPA is and how it works. There are options relating to life-sustaining treatment and you can choose one or more people to be your current attorney(s) and others to step in if the current attorney(s) cannot act.
