Where to Store Your Personal Directive in NWT

The Storage Problem That Undermines Most Personal Directives

A Personal Directive that nobody can find during an emergency is functionally identical to not having one at all. This happens more often than families expect. The directive gets signed, filed in a safety deposit box at the bank, and forgotten — until a medical crisis hits at 2 a.m. and paramedics need instructions that are locked behind a vault door at CIBC.

NWT geography makes this problem worse. When a medevac transfers a patient from Hay River to Stanton Territorial Hospital in Yellowknife — or from Yellowknife to Edmonton — the clinical team at the receiving facility needs immediate access to the patient's advance care instructions. If those instructions are sitting in a filing cabinet in Fort Simpson, the directive cannot serve its purpose.

Storage is not about preservation. It is about accessibility.

The Green Sleeve System

NWT healthcare providers use a standardized system for exactly this scenario. The Green Sleeve is a plastic pocket that sits on the patient's refrigerator and holds their advance care documents — the Personal Directive, the Goals of Care Designation (GCD) form, and any related clinical orders like a DNR.

The Green Sleeve works because paramedics and first responders are trained to look for it. When they enter a home during an emergency, the refrigerator is one of the first places they check for medical information. The system is low-tech and effective: a single, predictable location that everyone in the territory's emergency response chain knows to check.

Ask your primary care physician about setting up a Green Sleeve. If your clinic uses the system, they can provide the sleeve and help you ensure the right documents are inside.

Distribution: Who Gets a Copy

Your Personal Directive should exist in multiple locations simultaneously. The Personal Directives Act does not mandate a specific distribution protocol, but the practical reality of NWT healthcare — where patients routinely transfer between communities, hospitals, and provinces — demands deliberate distribution.

Your primary Agent needs a physical copy and a digital copy (scanned PDF, stored on their phone or in a secure cloud folder). Your Agent may need to present the directive to clinicians at Stanton Territorial Hospital, an Edmonton ICU, or a long-term care facility — and they may need to do it at short notice.

Your alternate Agent needs the same. If your primary Agent is unreachable during a crisis, your alternate steps in — and they need the document immediately, not after a trip to your house.

Your primary care physician or local health centre should receive a copy for integration into your electronic medical record (EMR). NWT healthcare providers can scan the directive directly into the EMR system, which means any clinician who pulls up your chart — whether in Yellowknife, Inuvik, or during a medevac handoff — can access your treatment instructions digitally.

Close family members who are not named as Agents should still know the directive exists and where to find it. They do not need decision-making authority to help locate and present the document during an emergency.

The Wallet Card

A laminated wallet card is the simplest failsafe for emergencies away from home. The card does not contain your full directive — it identifies that a directive exists, names your primary Agent with their phone number, and states where the full document is stored.

Emergency responders who find the card can contact your Agent immediately and begin coordinating care decisions while the full directive is being retrieved. In remote NWT communities where communication infrastructure can be unreliable, having your Agent's satellite phone number or alternative contact method on the card adds a practical layer of resilience.

What Not to Do

Do not store the only copy in a safety deposit box. Bank vaults are inaccessible outside business hours, require the keyholder to be present, and may require probate-level authorization to open if the keyholder is incapacitated. This directly contradicts the purpose of a directive that activates precisely when you cannot access things yourself.

Do not store the only copy with your lawyer. Law offices in Yellowknife keep business hours, and many NWT residents use lawyers in Edmonton who are even further removed from a northern medical emergency. Your lawyer should have a copy for their records, but they should never be the sole custodian.

Do not rely solely on a digital copy. While EMR integration is valuable, clinical systems can go down, and not every healthcare facility in the NWT has real-time access to every other facility's records. The physical copy in the Green Sleeve and the copy your Agent carries remain the primary access points.

Keeping Your Distribution List Current

Every time you update or replace your Personal Directive, you need to recall and replace every distributed copy. This is one of the most commonly missed steps in directive management. If old copies remain in circulation — in your physician's EMR, in your Agent's files, in your family member's hands — conflicting versions can surface during a crisis, creating confusion about which instructions are current.

The new directive should include an explicit revocation clause stating that all prior directives are revoked. But that clause only helps if the people holding old copies know to discard them and receive the replacement.

The Northwest Territories Advance Directive & Living Will Kit includes a document distribution tracker that lets you record who has each copy, when it was distributed, and when it was last confirmed current — turning storage from an afterthought into a system.

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