Living will requirements in Wyoming

Which document is this, really

Wyoming’s advance-directive law calls the whole document the Advance Health Care Directive. Inside that one law are two separate components: an individual instruction, which carries your treatment wishes, and a power of attorney for health care, which names the person who can decide for you. Wyoming leaves it up to you whether to put both in one document or keep them apart. Most people combine them, but the law itself does not require it.

There is no state-provided form for either part. A “Part 1 / Part 2” packet you may find online from a hospital or advocacy group is a private form, not something Wyoming’s statute prints or requires. You can use a packet like that, write your own, or use Myend’s Healthcare Directive, which is formatted to Wyoming’s actual signing rules rather than to that packet’s layout.

The two components are not signed the same way. The individual instruction has almost no formality at all. The power of attorney is the part that asks for witnesses or a notary. Knowing which half of the page you are signing matters more in Wyoming than in most states.

Who can make a Wyoming advance directive

Wyoming lets an adult, or an emancipated minor, make either component of the directive. The Act itself never defines “adult”, so that word points to Wyoming’s general age of majority, which is 18. An emancipated minor is a minor who has gone through Wyoming’s own emancipation process; a minor who has not is not covered here, whatever their circumstances.

Capacity is a practical, in-the-moment question rather than a diagnosis you need on file before you sign. It means you understand, at the time you sign, what your instruction or your power of attorney says and does, and what it means to name someone to decide for you.

Signing it so it counts

Wyoming’s two components are not signed the same way, and mixing them up is the easiest mistake to make with this document.

Your individual instruction

Your instruction about future treatment can be oral or written. Wyoming’s law asks for nothing else: no witness, no notary, no particular form of words. You can limit it to take effect only if a specific condition arises, and that limit is valid on its own terms.

Your power of attorney for health care

1. 1You sign

   You sign the power of attorney, or direct someone else to sign for you in your presence and at your direction.

2. 2Two witnesses, or a notary

   Wyoming gives you an either-or choice. Have the document signed by at least two witnesses, or skip the witnesses and have it acknowledged before a notarial officer instead. Either route makes the power of attorney valid. A witness may watch you sign, or watch you acknowledge a signature or the document itself, and each witness has to make a declaration in substance that they declare under penalty of perjury under Wyoming law that the person who signed or acknowledged the document is known to them to be the principal, and that the principal signed or acknowledged it in their presence.

3. 3If you use witnesses

   Neither witness can be a treating health care provider or their employee, the agent you are naming, or the operator or an employee of a community care facility or a residential care facility. Wyoming does not disqualify a witness simply for being related to you or for standing to inherit, which is unusual; most states do.

If you choose the notary route instead, the two witness lines are replaced by a single notary acknowledgment, and you do not need witnesses at all.

Naming your agent

The power of attorney for health care is where you name your agent, the person who can make health care decisions for you once your instruction or your agent’s authority takes effect. Wyoming’s eligibility rule is narrow: an owner, operator or employee of a residential or community care facility where you are receiving care cannot be your agent, unless that person is related to you by blood, marriage or adoption.

Notice what is not on that list. A treating health care provider cannot witness your power of attorney, but the law does not stop your own physician from being named your agent. The two rules protect against different risks, and Wyoming keeps them separate.

Your agent may make any health care decision you could have made yourself, following your directive and your other wishes so far as they know them, and your best interests, judged against your own values, where they do not. Absent a court order the other way, your agent’s decision takes precedence over a guardian’s. What no one gains under this Act is authority for mercy killing, assisted suicide or euthanasia, or for care that other Wyoming statutes prohibit.

When it takes effect

Unless your document says otherwise, your agent’s authority begins the moment your primary physician determines that you lack the capacity to make your own health care decisions, and it ends the moment your primary physician determines that capacity has come back. Until that happens you are presumed to have capacity: Wyoming keeps that presumption in place unless the primary physician has certified in writing that you lack it. The same physician makes the call on any condition you attached to your individual instruction. If your primary physician is not available, your treating primary health care provider can make that determination instead.

Wyoming asks for one clinician’s determination, not two. Some states build in a second physician to confirm the first before an agent can act; Wyoming does not.

If you are pregnant

Wyoming’s Health Care Decisions Act says nothing about pregnancy. The word does not appear anywhere in the Act, and a search of the surrounding chapters of Title 35 turns up nothing that applies here either. That means your instruction and your power of attorney apply exactly as written, pregnant or not; nothing in Wyoming’s advance-directive law sets them aside or changes them.

Changing or cancelling it

Wyoming treats the two components differently here too. You can revoke your individual instruction at any time, in any manner that shows you mean to revoke it, as long as you still have capacity; an oral revocation should be put into a signed, dated writing as soon afterward as possible. Anyone told about a revocation has to pass the word to your primary health care provider and to any institution treating you.

Revoking your agent’s appointment is stricter. It takes a signed writing, and nothing else counts, even though you still need capacity to do it. A divorce, annulment, or legal separation automatically revokes a spouse named as agent, unless your document says otherwise. Signing a later directive that conflicts with an earlier one revokes the earlier one, but only to the extent the two actually conflict.

Making sure it is found

Give a copy of whichever parts you signed to your agent, your physician, and the hospital you are most likely to use, and keep the original where your family knows to look. An instruction or a power of attorney nobody can find when it matters works no better than one that was never signed.

A card in your wallet that says the document exists, and where the original is kept, closes most of the gap that a state registry would otherwise fill.

This is not a POLST

Wyoming has a second statute for this, the Provider Orders for Life Sustaining Treatment Program Act, which sets up the state’s POLST program and has the Department of Health prescribe a standardized POLST form and publish it for downloading. The program is commonly called WyoPOLST. It is a different kind of document from your Advance Health Care Directive: a POLST form turns a seriously ill patient’s goals into medical orders, signed by the primary health care provider who discussed them with the patient, and it is meant to be complied with across care settings, hospital, nursing facility, home and ambulance alike. Your directive, by contrast, is something you put in place in advance, before any of that is happening. Myend prepares the Advance Health Care Directive. It does not, and cannot, produce a POLST, because that has to come from a treating clinician.

What is different about Wyoming

Wyoming lets you give your treatment instructions out loud, with no witness in the room, and still asks for two witnesses or a notary the moment you name an agent.

Most states treat the whole advance directive as one signing event. Wyoming splits it in two. Your individual instruction, the part that says what care you do and do not want, can be oral, can be written with no witness in sight, and is still a real instruction under the law. Your power of attorney for health care, the part that hands decisions to another person, gets the state’s ordinary formality: two witnesses or a notary, and a short list of people who cannot stand in as either. The split is not an oversight; the Act defines the two pieces separately and gives each its own execution rule.

Wyoming’s law is also quiet about pregnancy. The Living Will Act that once covered some of this ground was repealed outright in 2005, and the law that replaced it never wrote pregnancy back in. There is no viability test, no physician certification, and no automatic pause on your directive; it simply applies as written.

One more quiet difference: Wyoming asks a single physician to decide when your agent’s authority starts and stops. Where other states build in a second doctor’s sign-off, Wyoming does not.

Common questions

Sources and review