What is a health and welfare LPA?
This type of lasting power of attorney covers medical treatment, care arrangements and daily routine. Unlike the financial version it can only be used once you have lost the capacity to make the decision yourself, and authority over life-sustaining treatment must be granted expressly.
Decisions it covers include where you live, who provides your care, what you eat and wear, and consent to or refusal of medical treatment. Without one, those decisions are made by clinicians and social services applying a best-interests test, with family consulted but not in control.
It interacts with an advance decision to refuse treatment. Broadly, whichever document was made later takes precedence over the same treatment, so making both without thinking about the sequence creates ambiguity at exactly the wrong moment.
It is the less-completed of the two LPAs, and often the one families later wish had existed.