Emergency Contact
So, you’re someone’s emergency contact? Are you ready for that? Who is your emergency contact, do they know what would be important to you for medical treatment if you couldn’t advocate for yourself?
If you’ve joined us for any Pre-Dead Social Club events, you know we spend some time talking about who gets to make medical decisions for us if we’re unable to make them for ourselves.
3 REASONS YOU SHOULD CARE
Our medical system is complicated.
Relationships can be complicated.
Who you want to advocate for you, might not be the legal person who can. (Just because you list someone on a form or your phone as an emergency contact, doesn’t give them legal rights to advocate for you if you can’t for yourself.
CONSIDER THIS
You’re in an accident in New Hampshire and cannot advocate for yourself, and you don’t have an Advance Directive. This means a medical surrogate will be assigned to you for up to 180 days based on the order of the medical surrogate list (below).
WHERE TO START
Grab your phone (if you aren’t already holding it).
Navigate to Settings and find your emergency contacts (on an iPhone this is under Emergency SOS and then scroll down and you’ll see any emergency contacts you’ve added there.
Note who you have listed here (if anyone).
What’s their relationship to you?
Locate them on the Medical Surrogate List below.
Medical Surrogate List
Your spouse of civil union partner / common-law spouse as defined by RSA NH 457:39 (if you’re an NH resident).
Any of your adult children
Your parents
Any of your adult siblings
Any of your adult grandchildren
Any of your grandparents
Any of your adult aunt, uncle, niece, or nephews
Close friend of yours
The agent with financial power of attorney, or a conservator appointed in accordance with NH RSA 464, the guardian of the patient’s estate.
This list represents current NH laws related to order of contact for medical surrogacy. Each state has different laws you should be aware of, although similarities exist.
Will the person you have listed as your emergency contact be able to make decisions for you under NH law, or is someone higher up on the list?
What did you just discover?
Maybe you need to update your emergency contacts (no time like the present!). Or you realized the person you want to speak for you is so far down the list that they won’t be contacted, so you’ll need to make it official by completing an advance directive.
Each state has its own Advance Directive (just to keep it interesting for us all).
If you’re not an NH resident, just Google ‘advance directive form’ and your state to find one for you.
Does your emergency contact know what medical treatments you’d want and don’t want if you couldn’t advocate for yourself? And if you’re an emergency contact—how confident are you in making those decisions for someone else?
TAKE THE QUIZ
Found on pages 21 & 22 of this guide. It doesn’t matter what state you live in, it’s a great quiz!
https://healthynh.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/MedicalDecisonsHandbook.pdf
