How to make your Health LPA online
A Health and Welfare LPA lets people you trust make decisions about your medical treatment, care and daily living arrangements if you can no longer make them yourself. It can only be used once you’ve lost the ability to make those decisions. With A.D.E Wills, you make it through a video appointment with a professional estate planner. We prepare the LPA, act as your Certificate Provider and register it with the Office of the Public Guardian (OPG), so it’s ready when needed.
Step 1: Book your appointment
Fill in the form on our website or give us a call, and we’ll find a time that suits you. Your instructions appointment can be online by video, with a telephone option as backup. If you’d like both a Health and a Financial LPA, we cover both in the same appointment.
Step 2: Your appointment
We’ll talk through each decision with you:
- Your attorneys: the people you choose to make decisions for you. They need no legal knowledge, but they must be over 18 and should be people you trust and know well, such as your spouse, partner, children or a close friend. There is no legal limit on how many you appoint.
- How your attorneys decide together: if you appoint more than one, they can act jointly and severally (together or on their own), jointly (always together), or jointly for some decisions and jointly and severally for others. Jointly and severally is the most common and the most practical. If attorneys who must act jointly can’t agree, the decision can’t be made.
- Replacement attorneys: people who step in if an original attorney dies, loses capacity, chooses to stop acting, or was your spouse or civil partner and the relationship has legally ended. A replacement can’t stand in temporarily, for example while an attorney is on holiday.
- Life-sustaining treatment: whether your attorneys can give or refuse consent to life-sustaining treatment on your behalf. This covers care, surgery, medicine or other help needed to keep you alive, such as a serious operation, cancer treatment, or artificial nutrition or hydration. Whether a treatment is life-sustaining depends on the situation: for someone with pneumonia, a simple course of antibiotics could be. If you give your attorneys this power, they can speak to your doctors as if they were you. If you don’t, your doctors will take their views into account alongside any written statements you’ve made.
- People to notify: up to five people who know you well and would raise concerns if they thought you were pressured or that fraud was involved. They’re told when the LPA is about to be registered and don’t need to do anything unless they have concerns.
- Preferences: things you’d like your attorneys to bear in mind about your care, worded with “prefer” or “would like”. Your attorneys don’t have to follow them.
- Instructions: things your attorneys must do, worded with “must” or “have to”.
These are personal decisions, and we’ll take as long as the conversation needs. Anything you’re unsure about, we’ll explain in plain English.
Step 3: Signing
An LPA must be signed in the right order to be valid: you first, then your Certificate Provider, then your attorneys and any replacements. The signing itself must be done in person. With our Full Service we attend and witness it for you. With Self-Sign, you sign at home and post it back.
Step 4: Registration
Once everything is signed, we register your LPA with the OPG. The OPG checks it has been made correctly and returns the registered LPA, ready if it’s ever needed.
What it costs
Online LPAs start from £340 for Self-Sign or £480 for Full Service, at a fixed fee agreed before any work begins. All prices exclude the OPG’s £92 registration fee per LPA, which is paid directly to the OPG.
Get started
Book a free 15-minute call or request a call back, and we’ll take it from there.
