DECEMBER 14, 2015 VOLUME 22 NUMBER 46
Imagine: you have just been named as guardian for your aging father. You are responsible for his medical care and decisions, his comfort and his placement. You were appointed, in part, because of your concern about his safety at home — you are thinking perhaps he needs to be moved to a safer location. Your job is to eliminate — or at least dramatically reduce — the risk that he might fall in his home, that he might wander, that he might not take his medications. Right?
Not exactly.
If you were grappling with this common-place scenario several decades ago, the answer might have been clear. Legal scholars and advisers generally agreed that the primary standard governing guardians should be to protect the “best interests” of their wards. That usually meant protection from risk first, and addressing emotional and psychic needs after physical protection could be afforded.
Let’s spin the hypothetical back in time a few years. You are talking with your still-capable father about his wishes. Presciently, you ask him this question: “So, Dad, if you were at risk of falling here in your home and the only way to be sure you were safe would be to move into a nursing home or assisted living facility, would you want to go?” What do you suppose he would have said?
He probably would have asked for more information. How much risk? How serious of an injury? What might the facility look like? What other limitations might he have to endure?
We manage risk in our daily lives all the time. We make decisions from brushing our teeth to crossing the street outside a crosswalk to skydiving or motorcycle riding — and we weigh the likelihood of injury from each action constantly and almost unconsciously. When put in charge of someone else’s care, however, it human nature to try to eliminate risk altogether. That is not the way your father managed his life before you were appointed as his guardian, and it is not the way you should make decisions for him now.
Over the last several decades, legal writers have developed a concept of “substituted judgment” to guide decision-making by guardians. The doctrine is misleadingly named — though it may sound like you, as guardian, are to substitute your judgment for your father’s, it means exactly the opposite. When making decisions for your father, you should start with a good-faith attempt to figure out what your father would want and substitute that decision for the one you would otherwise make on his behalf.
Does that mean you can never place your father in a more-controlled facility? Of course not. But it does mean that you need to make an open-eyed analysis of his likely wishes, and try to emulate his approach to the decision if he were making it for himself. Are there less-restrictive ways to reduce the risk to a suitable level (but not to zero)? What other negative effects might flow from the proposed decision? What would your father do?
Is this principle universally applied? Perhaps not, but it is clearly the law in Arizona and likely the rule in most other U.S. states. It is definitely the modern trend in legal thinking.
Does this concept only apply to guardianships? No — it applies to health care powers of attorney, financial powers of attorney, conservatorships (of the estate), and trust administration. In fact, it applies to even informal, unsanctioned decision-making, like when you consent to medical treatment as next of kin.
Do these rules apply only to big decisions? No, they apply to even (perhaps especially) the small decisions — visiting schedules, travel, caretaker changes and everything else.
Is it important that our hypothetical talks about your father? What about your mother? Your brother, your daughter, or anyone else? The same thinking applies to any substitute decision-maker for an adult — though it is obviously much, much harder to apply in the case of a person who never had the opportunity to develop a risk profile of their own. In other words, decision-making for your son who was born with a profound disability does not require you to try to figure out what he would have decided if he had been competent for at least a brief period after his eighteenth birthday — though it wouldn’t hurt to try to think through what a similarly-situated person might reasonably decide.
Does this mean you have to live with the real possibility of a disastrous outcome? No, it doesn’t mean that you must engage in risky behavior. It only means that you must realistically weigh the possibility of a bad result in protecting your father. Might he slip away from the care home, get lost in the desert and have a terrible outcome? Yes — but it’s not too likely, and probably doesn’t justify locking him into his room at the facility.
In other words, you might try applying a special variant of the “golden rule.” What decision would you want him to make for you, if the roles were reversed? Might he have come to the same conclusion that you are now reaching?
Good luck handling your job as substitute decision-maker. It can be emotionally draining, and physically tiring. You will find it much more satisfying, we predict, if you will think about management, rather than elimination, of risk.
