AnalysisThe main purposes of Legislative Bill 247 as stated in the bill are two: First, it will facilitate advance planning to help prevent unnecessary involuntary commitment and incarceration, improve patient safety and health, improve mental health care, and enable an individual to exercise control over such individual's mental health treatment. Second it will protect patient safety, autonomy, and health by allowing an individual to create an advance mental health care directive to instruct and direct the individual's mental health care. With respect to the advance mental health care directive, the bill requires the directive to be signed before a Notary or in the presence of two witnesses. A statutory directive form that includes a section for notarization is found in the bill. The Notary performing the notarization must certify that the Notary is not the attorney in fact of the person signing the power of attorney, that the individual appears to be of sound mind, not under duress or undue influence, and that the individual acknowledges signing the power of attorney is the individual’s voluntary act and deed.
Read Legislative Bill 247.