Georgia POLST Form: What It Is and How to Use It

When a loved one is seriously ill or approaching the end of life, families in Georgia often encounter two documents they did not expect to navigate simultaneously: the Georgia Advance Directive for Health Care and the Georgia POLST form. They sound like variations on the same thing. They are not. Confusing them — or failing to have both in the right hands at the right moment — can result in unwanted resuscitation attempts, prolonged hospitalizations, and exactly the kind of medical intervention your family member specifically wanted to avoid.

What a POLST Form Actually Is

POLST stands for Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment. In Georgia, the POLST is authorized under O.C.G.A. § 31-1-14. Unlike an advance directive, which is a legal document expressing a person's wishes, the Georgia POLST is a medical order — it carries the same legal weight as any other physician order in a hospital chart.

That distinction matters enormously in practice. A paramedic arriving at your home cannot legally act on a living will or advance directive. They must follow a valid POLST. When a 911 call goes out for a terminally ill patient and there is no POLST on file, emergency responders are legally required to initiate full resuscitation. A properly completed POLST on the refrigerator — the nationally recognized placement — stops that from happening if that is what the patient wanted.

Who Signs the Georgia POLST

The Georgia POLST form requires two signatures:

1. The attending physician (or authorized practitioner acting within the scope of Georgia law)
2. The patient, or their legally authorized representative if the patient lacks capacity

This is distinct from the Georgia Advance Directive for Health Care under O.C.G.A. § 31-32-5, which requires only the declarant's signature plus two adult witnesses. Because the POLST is a physician order, a physician must be involved in its creation. Families cannot prepare a POLST on their own and then ask a doctor to sign it after the fact — the form is meant to emerge from a documented conversation between the care team and the patient or their representative.

The legally authorized representative for POLST purposes follows a specific hierarchy under Georgia law: the agent named in a valid advance directive comes first; if there is none, the next of kin hierarchy applies. This is one of the primary reasons a Georgia Advance Directive for Health Care should be completed before a health crisis, not during one.

What the Georgia POLST Covers

The form addresses three principal medical decisions:

Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR): The first section specifies whether the patient wants full CPR attempts or wants to be allowed a natural death (AND — Allow Natural Death). This is the section emergency responders check first.

Medical Interventions: The second section ranges from full treatment (all life-sustaining interventions, including mechanical ventilation and ICU admission) to limited interventions (hospitalization but no intensive care) to comfort-focused care only (symptom management, no transfer to hospital unless necessary for comfort).

Medically Assisted Nutrition: The third section addresses artificially administered fluids and nutrition, including feeding tubes.

These decisions can be revised at any time as long as the patient retains decision-making capacity, or by their representative if they do not. A new POLST supersedes a prior one.

Georgia POLST vs. the Georgia Advance Directive for Health Care

The two documents serve different functions at different stages of life planning.

The Georgia Advance Directive for Health Care is a planning document. It is appropriate for any competent adult in any state of health. It names a healthcare agent, sets out treatment preferences for future scenarios, and guides decision-making if the person becomes incapacitated. Execution requires two competent adult witnesses (neither can be the named agent, a beneficiary, or anyone who financially benefits from the declarant's death). Notarization is not required in Georgia for this specific document.

The Georgia POLST is appropriate when a person has a serious illness, frailty, or advanced age that makes the health decisions on the form immediately relevant — typically when a physician would not be surprised if the patient died within the next year. It is a clinical tool for translating already-established wishes into immediately actionable medical orders.

In practical terms: complete an advance directive as part of normal estate planning, then work with your physician to complete a POLST when the clinical situation warrants it. The advance directive should guide what goes into the POLST. Conflicts between the two documents — which can happen when a patient changes their mind verbally but the paperwork does not get updated — are resolved by defaulting to the most recent, specific clinical document. A POLST dated after an advance directive generally controls on the specific decisions it addresses.

Where the POLST Must Travel

A POLST only works if the right people can see it. Georgia's standard practice mirrors the national recommendation:

• At home: Post the original form on the refrigerator, inside the front door, or in a clearly labeled folder kept in a visible location.
• In a care facility: The original must travel with the patient when they transfer to a hospital, skilled nursing facility, or hospice. Copies should be in the chart.
• In the ambulance: Paramedics follow the form only if they can find it quickly. If a patient is transported from home, the form should go in the ambulance with them.

A POLST left in a bedside drawer or a home safe will not help anyone responding to a 911 call.

What Happens If There Is No POLST

For families managing the estate of someone who has recently died after a period of serious illness, the absence of a completed POLST — or the existence of one that was not followed because it was not accessible — can be a source of profound distress and, in some cases, unexpected medical debt. Hospitals that initiated unwanted resuscitation procedures will bill for those services. The estate is responsible for those bills as a creditor claim in probate.

This is one of the reasons Georgia's Year's Support provision matters for surviving spouses and minor children: it allows the immediate family to claim a statutory portion of the estate ahead of unsecured creditors, which can include large, unexpected medical bills incurred in the final hospitalization. Getting both the POLST in place before a crisis and understanding Year's Support after death are two sides of the same financial protection.

Planning for the Whole Picture

The POLST is one piece of a larger set of Georgia-specific documents that surviving families need to understand. The advance directive, the financial power of attorney, the POLST, and then — after death — the probate forms, Year's Support petition, state pension notifications, and property tax exemption filings all form a single administrative continuum.

If you are helping a family member through a serious illness, starting this paperwork now avoids the worst-case scenario: an unprepared family, a 911 call, and a medical team with no orders to follow except the default, which is always full resuscitation.

The Georgia Survivor Benefits Navigator covers the post-death side of this continuum — what to file, which agencies to contact, and which statutory deadlines run out faster than most families realize.

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