A place like that - Advance directives and nursing home admissions

Decisions about admitting a mentally incapacitated person to nursing home raise a variety of difficult legal, ethical, and public policy issues. A strategy for anticipating and addressing this contingency prospectively, by encouraging execution of formal advance planning directives while the individual is still capable, may mitigate some of the dilemmas associated with these issues. The author discusses the contours and feasibility of such a strategy, analyzing the possible uses of advance directives both for prospectively authorizing nursing home admission on one's own behalf and for refusing such admission, or placing explicit conditions on such admission, in advance of the time that the actual decision must be made.