This course was created and provided by the Virtual Center of Excellence (VCE), a former project of the Detroit Wayne Integrated Health Network (DWIHN). Content and format will be updated in the near future to address current accessibility standards. If you are unable to access the content in this section, please contact the imp support team for assistance.

The Advance Directives course explores planning for medical and mental health care in the event of loss of decision-making ability.

Defining Medical and Mental Health Advance Directives

This course has been designed to assist those direct care workers with understanding the difficult process of creating advance directives with their clients. This course provides detailed information about what differences there are between medical and mental health advance directives. This course does also cover the updates to the Medical and Mental Health Advance Directive for Health Care Decision Making policy. 

Advance Directives and Your Clients

In many cases, determining the proper course of action after a behavioral health problem takes place can be extremely daunting for clients and clients' families. This course has been designed to provide direct care workers with the tools to better understand the challenges those clients face and how to communicate the values of advanced directives to their support structure. 

Federal and State Advance Directive Requirements 

This course provides important, updated information regarding the Federal and State requirements for accurately creating, filing, and implementing clients' advance directives for their mental or medical health care.  

There are 4 types of Advance Directives and we will discuss them in this course.

• Understand the impact of the revised “Medical and Mental Health Advance Directive for Health Care Decision Making” policy on service delivery.
• Understand the value and challenges of medical and mental health Advance Directives.
• Understand federal and state Advance Directive requirements.