ACT Advance Directive Templates: Free Forms vs. a Navigation Kit
The Free Government Forms
The ACT government provides the core advance care planning forms at no charge. You can download them from the ACT Legislation Register and ACT Health websites:
- Health Direction: Current Form AF2017-46 from the ACT Legislation Register, under the Medical Treatment (Health Directions) Act 2006. This is the legally binding treatment refusal instrument.
- Enduring Power of Attorney: Form AF2017-45 from the ACT Legislation Register, under the Powers of Attorney Act 2006. This covers financial, personal care, and healthcare decision-making authority.
- Statement of Choices: Included in the ACT Advance Care Planning Booklet, available from the ACT Health website. This is the non-binding values and preferences document.
The Health Direction and EPoA forms are the approved statutory forms. The Statement of Choices is an ACT Health non-binding planning form. They are not third-party templates — they are the approved forms that clinicians and courts recognise. Any template you find elsewhere should be compared against these originals.
What the Free Forms Include
The Health Direction form provides a basic structure for recording treatment refusals, a witnessing section, and an explanatory cover page. The EPoA form includes sections for appointing attorneys, specifying their powers, the attorney acceptance protocol, and witnessing certificates.
The Statement of Choices booklet is the most comprehensive of the three. Published by Canberra Health Services, it walks through values-based questions — what matters to you in daily life, what quality of life means to you, your preferences for comfort care — and provides space to record your answers.
What the Free Forms Miss
The forms tell you what to fill in. They do not tell you how to fill them in correctly, or what goes wrong when you get it wrong.
The witnessing trap. The EPoA form requires two witnesses, with Witness 1 being a person authorised to witness statutory declarations (solicitor, JP, or court registrar). The form states this requirement — but it does not explain what happens if you get it wrong. The consequence is total invalidity. An improperly witnessed EPoA is legally useless, and you may not discover this until the principal has lost capacity and cannot execute a replacement.
The chronological hierarchy. The form does not explain the interaction between Health Directions and EPoAs. Under section 19 of the Medical Treatment (Health Directions) Act 2006, if the documents are consistent, the attorney must comply with the Health Direction. If they are inconsistent, the attorney must comply with the EPoA when the Health Direction was made first, and with the Health Direction when the Health Direction was made after the EPoA. The sequencing of execution determines which document controls — and neither form warns you about this.
The "Health Attorney" default. If you complete a Health Direction but not an EPoA, and you later lose capacity, your family does not automatically step in as your decision-maker. Instead, the Guardianship and Management of Property Act 1991 activates a default hierarchy and appoints a "Health Attorney" — who critically cannot authorise the withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment. The forms do not explain this gap.
Clinical specificity. The Health Direction form provides blank space for treatment refusals. It does not guide you on how specific those refusals need to be. "I refuse life support" is clinically ambiguous — different doctors interpret "life support" differently. Listing specific interventions (CPR, mechanical ventilation, artificial nutrition, IV vasopressors) removes that ambiguity and makes the Health Direction enforceable in practice, not just in theory.
Cross-border recognition. The forms assume you live in the ACT and will receive all treatment in the ACT. If you live in Queanbeyan or Jerrabomberra and work or receive medical care in Canberra, the forms do not address whether your ACT documents will be recognised by NSW clinicians and institutions — or vice versa.
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Online Legal Platforms
Services like Safewill, Willed, and ezyWill offer digital question-and-answer funnels that generate completed ACT-compliant EPoA documents. They are convenient — you answer questions on screen and get a PDF ready for printing and signing.
What they cover well: the form generation itself. The output is typically compliant with the Powers of Attorney Act 2006 requirements.
What they do not cover: the physical logistics of witnessing and attorney acceptance, document storage and clinical registration (MyDHR, My Health Record), post-execution distribution, cross-border considerations, and the strategic sequencing of Health Directions against EPoAs. The digital platform ends at the PDF. Everything that happens after printing — and everything that determines whether the document actually works in a clinical crisis — is outside its scope.
When a Guided Kit Is Worth It
If your situation is straightforward — you live in the ACT, you know who you want as your attorney, and you are comfortable interpreting the statutory forms yourself — the free government forms may be sufficient.
A guided navigation kit adds value when:
- You own property in the ACT and need to understand Land Titles registration
- You or the principal lives on the NSW/ACT border and needs cross-border recognition
- You want specific clinical wording for treatment refusals (not just blank space)
- You need to coordinate the execution sequence of multiple documents
- You want a tracking system for where documents are stored and when they were last reviewed
- A parent is approaching aged care admission and you need to integrate documents with clinical systems quickly
The ACT Advance Directive & Living Will Kit is designed around exactly these gaps — not replacing the government forms, but providing the navigational layer that turns a stack of blank forms into a complete, clinically actionable plan.
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