§ 36-3201 et seq. · Arizona
Arizona: how to sign your advance directive
Arizona's statutory instrument is a health care power of attorney, and the living will is an attachment to it. That is not a description; it is the definition. §36-3201(10):
Why WearableDocs
In Arizona, the directive has to be found
It does not wait on delivery to a clinician to operate — but a document no one can produce when asked for is a document that fails in practice. WearableDocs puts the signed directive on a card you carry and a page that opens in seconds, instead of a phone call to whoever might know which drawer.
You answer a few questions — your name, your state, and what you refuse — and WearableDocs builds the directive. Print it, sign it, upload it. Changing your answers later is part of the plan, so nothing is locked in.
What Arizona asks
What you need to sign in Arizona
- Instruments
- A health care power of attorney, with the living will as an attachment to it (§36-3201(10)). A separate mental health care power of attorney exists under §36-3281, which is not captured
- Form
- Illustrative — a document "drafted in substantial compliance with this chapter" (§36-3201(5)); the §36-3224 form is "offered as a sample only"
- Execution
- Notarised OR witnessed by at least one adult, who affirms presence, sound mind and no duress (§36-3221(A)(3))
- May not witness
- The person designated to make medical decisions; anyone directly involved in providing health care to the principal at the time of execution (§36-3221(C)). A sole witness may not be related by blood, marriage or adoption and may not be an estate beneficiary (§36-3221(D))
- May not be your agent
- An adult. A person whose licence as a fiduciary is suspended or revoked under §14-5651 may not serve in any capacity unless related by blood, adoption or marriage (§36-3221(E), §36-3223(D)). No other bar appears in the captured sections
- Copy rule
- No copy-equivalence provision in the captured sections. The sample form states a reliance rule instead: the directive "continues in effect for all who may rely on it except those to whom I have given notice of its revocation" (§36-3224). §36-3205 and -3206 are not captured
- Delivery
- No — the directive does not wait on delivery to a clinician to operate. A provider "shall make a reasonable effort to locate and shall follow a health care directive", and to consult a surrogate (§36-3231(A))
- Who decides
- No determiner and no physician count is named anywhere. The trigger is that the patient is "unable to make or communicate health care treatment decisions" (§36-3231(A)). If no surrogate can be located, the attending physician may decide after an ethics committee or a second physician concurs (§36-3231(B))
- Trigger overridable
- No override found. §36-3223(A) ties the agent's authority to acting "while the principal is unable to do so", and the sample form fixes the trigger: "This power of attorney is effective on my inability to make or communicate health care decisions" (§36-3224). §36-3205 and -3206 are not captured
- Registry
- Yes — a health care directives registry, contemplated at §36-3291 and operated by a "qualifying health information exchange organization" designated by the Department of Health Services (§36-3201(14)). §36-3291 itself is not captured
- Age
- 18 — the agent must be an adult (§36-3221(A)(1)); no departure recorded
- Revocation
- By a written revocation, by oral notice to the surrogate or to a health care provider, by making a new health care directive, or by "any other act that demonstrates a specific intent to revoke" (§36-3202). No automatic revocation on divorce appears in the captured sections
- Oral instructions
- The directive is defined as a document (§36-3201(5)). Oral revocation is expressly permitted (§36-3202(2))
- Uninitialled box
- On the sample form the agent "is directed to implement those choices I have initialed in the living will" (§36-3224) — a choice left uninitialled is not among the directions the form tells the agent to carry out
- Provider may not require
- Yes — §36-3207(A): a person "shall not require a person to execute or prohibit a person from executing a health care directive as a condition for providing health care services or insurance"
- Artificial food and fluid
- An agent may consent to its permanent withdrawal; a family surrogate may not. §36-3203(E): "A surrogate who is not the patient's agent or guardian shall not consent to or approve the permanent withdrawal of the artificial administration of food or fluid."
- Carried device
- Nothing for the directive. A prehospital medical care directive is contemplated at §36-3251 — the sample form asks whether one has been completed — and that section is not captured
- Citation
- § 36-3201 et seq.
Read from the enacted statute, 2026-09-18.
The instrument
What Arizona actually recognizes
"'Living will' means a statement written either by a person who has not written a health care power of attorney or by the principal as an attachment to a health care power of attorney and intended to guide or control the health care treatment decisions that can be made on that person's behalf."
The umbrella term is "health care directive", and §36-3201(5) defines it by its tolerance rather than its form: "a document drafted in substantial compliance with this chapter." §36-3224 says the same thing from the other side — "Any writing that meets the requirements of section 36-3221 may be used to create a health care power of attorney" — and calls the form that follows a sample only.
What Arizona does not supply is a determiner. The chapter names no physician count and no decision-maker for incapacity. The trigger is left as a fact rather than a finding: §36-3231(A), "If an adult patient is unable to make or communicate health care treatment decisions." That absence is unusual, and it is the thing this page is built around.
What the popular guides get wrong
Corrections for Arizona
"You need two witnesses." Arizona needs one — or a notarisation. §36-3221(A)(3) requires only that the power of attorney "is notarized or is witnessed in writing by at least one adult."
The count is not the only thing that changes when you use one witness. A sole witness "may not be related to the principal by blood, marriage or adoption and may not be entitled to any part of the principal's estate by will or by operation of law" (§36-3221(D)). With two witnesses, that restriction does not apply. An Arizonan who hunted for two unrelated witnesses did work the statute did not ask for; an Arizonan who used one witness and a relative signed an instrument that does not meet §36-3221.
Carried on you
What a WearableDocs card does in Arizona
WearableDocs is how your Arizona advance directive gets found. There is no bracelet, necklace, card or facsimile provision attached to the health care power of attorney or to the living will that rides on it.
What Arizona does have is a separate instrument that the chapter's own sample form points at, in a line the declarant completes by hand: whether they have "completed a prehospital medical care directive pursuant to section 36-3251, Arizona Revised Statutes" (§36-3224). That is a different document for a different decision, and §36-3251 is not in the captured corpus — so what it requires, permits or honours is not established on this page. What can be said is that the statute keeps it apart from the directive in the same way it keeps the living will an attachment rather than a document of its own.
The directive's own position is findability. §36-3231(A) puts a duty on the provider to "make a reasonable effort to locate and shall follow a health care directive" — and a reasonable effort is bounded by what can actually be produced. The sample form's reliance sentence ("continues in effect for all who may rely on it") protects the people acting on it; it does not make the document any easier to produce at a bedside at two in the morning.
And the boundary that belongs on every page in this set: a directive does not bind EMS on CPR. That is the prehospital directive, or a DNR order, and Arizona treats it as a separate instrument.