Ark. Code Ann. § 20-6-101 et seq. · Arkansas
Arkansas: how to sign your advance directive
Arkansas rebuilt its instrument in 2013. Act 1264 added a subchapter to Title 20, chapter 6 — "Subchapter 1 — Arkansas Healthcare Decisions Act" — and gave the state three named things instead of two: an individual instruction, an advance directive for health care, and a designation of surrogate.
Why WearableDocs
In Arkansas, 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 Arkansas asks
What you need to sign in Arkansas
- Instruments
- Individual instruction · advance directive for health care · designation of surrogate — one subchapter, Ark. Code Title 20, ch. 6, subch. 1
- Form
- Board-adopted and rule-revisable. Section 2 of Act 1264 directs the State Board of Health to adopt forms and permits revision by rule. The form pages are not in the captured Act text
- Execution
- Notarised OR witnessed by two witnesses (§20-6-103(b)(3)). A witnessed directive "shall contain an attestation clause" attesting the witnesses' compliance (§20-6-103(b)(5))
- May not witness
- A competent adult who is not the agent; at least one of the two must be unrelated by blood, marriage or adoption and not an estate beneficiary (§20-6-103(b)(4))
- May not be your agent
- None. The Act imposes no agent disqualification. The bars attach to surrogates — a treating provider, an employee of one, an operator of a health care institution or its employee may not be designated as surrogate unless a relative (§20-6-105(d))
- Copy rule
- A copy has the same effect as the original (§20-6-113)
- Delivery
- No — the directive does not wait on delivery to a clinician to operate. A surrogate may act only once the designated physician has determined the principal lacks capacity and no agent or guardian is available (§20-6-105(b))
- Who decides
- The designated physician. §20-6-103(d)(1): "If necessary, the designated physician shall determine whether a principal lacks or has recovered capacity…", and may consult others as appropriate
- Trigger overridable
- Yes — "Unless otherwise specified in an advance directive, the authority of an agent becomes effective only upon a determination that the principal lacks capacity" (§20-6-103(c)); an instruction "may be limited to take effect only if a specified condition arises" (§20-6-103(a)(3))
- Registry
- None
- Age
- "An adult or emancipated minor" may give an instruction or execute a directive (§20-6-103(a)(1), (b)(1)); no departure from 18 recorded
- Reciprocity
- Yes — a directive executed outside Arkansas by a nonresident is given effect if it complies with this subchapter or with the law of the state of the principal's residence (§20-6-103(g))
- Revocation
- A principal with capacity may revoke all or part of a directive "in any manner that communicates an intent to revoke", but the agent designation only by a signed written statement or by personally informing the supervising provider (§20-6-104(a), (b)). An annulment, divorce, dissolution or legal separation revokes a spouse's designation as agent unless the decree or the directive says otherwise (§20-6-104(c))
- Oral instructions
- Yes — "The instruction may be oral or written." (§20-6-103(a)(2))
- Provider may not require
- Yes — §20-6-103(h): a provider, institution, health service plan, insurer, self-insured welfare benefit plan or nonprofit hospital plan "shall not require the execution or revocation of an advance directive as a condition of the principal's being insured for or receiving health care"
- Medical food and fluid
- A surrogate not designated by the principal may withhold or withdraw artificial nutrition or hydration only if the designated physician and a second independent physician certify in the current clinical record that it "is merely prolonging the act of dying" and that the principal "is highly unlikely to regain capacity to make medical decisions" (§20-6-106(b))
- Carried device
- Definitions of "Emergency responder" and "Universal Do Not Resuscitate Order" sit in the operative text with no mechanism attached. See below
- Citation
- Ark. Code Ann. § 20-6-101 et seq.
Read from the enacted statute, 2026-09-18.
The instrument
What Arkansas actually recognizes
The definitions are generous. §20-6-102(1): "'Advance directive' means an individual instruction or a written statement that anticipates and directs the provision of health care for an individual, including without limitation a living will or a durable power of attorney for health care." The older declaration statute survives alongside it — the Rights of the Terminally Ill or Permanently Unconscious Act, §20-17-201 et seq. — and §20-6-116 keeps a pre-2013 living will valid.
Then Arkansas hands the paperwork to a board. The Act's Section 2 is headed "DO NOT CODIFY. Forms." and reads: "The State Board of Health shall adopt the following forms and may by rule revise the forms so long as the revisions are consistent with the intent of this act." The form pages themselves are not in the operative text as captured. Arkansas is one of the states whose paperwork is a moving target by design, and the statute that governs the signature does not contain the form the signature goes on.
What the popular guides get wrong
Corrections for Arkansas
"Two witnesses or a notary — either is fine." Either route is fine at the start; they are not interchangeable afterwards. §20-6-103(b)(5): "A written advance directive that is witnessed shall contain an attestation clause that attests that the witnesses comply with this subsection (b)."
The clause is a requirement of the document, not a formality of the ceremony. It has to be on the page the witnesses signed, and a notarisation cannot cure a missing attestation clause after the fact. An Arkansas directive that was properly witnessed in every other respect and lacks the clause is the failure mode here, and it is invisible to everyone who was in the room.
Carried on you
What a WearableDocs card does in Arkansas
Arkansas has built the parts of a carried-device regime and has not, in the captured text, attached them to anything.
Two definitions sit in §20-6-102 doing no work that the page can point to: §20-6-102(5), "'Emergency responder' means a paid or volunteer firefighter, law enforcement officer, or other public safety official or volunteer acting within the scope of his or her proper function or rendering emergency care at the scene of an emergency"; and §20-6-102(25), "'Universal Do Not Resuscitate Order' means a written order that applies regardless of the treatment setting and that is signed by the principal's physician that states that in the event the principal suffers cardiac or respiratory arrest, cardiopulmonary resuscitation should not be attempted."
Both are defined and neither is used in the operative sections captured. The likely home is the State Board of Health's form pages, which are the gap named above, and this page does not guess what they say.
So what can be said plainly: nothing in the captured text gives an Arkansas advance directive force because it is carried on the person. The universal DNR order is a separate instrument with a separate signature — the principal's physician signs it — and it is the order, not the directive, that a device would speak for.
What Arkansas gives the directive is copy-equivalence, in the same flat form Alaska and the uniform-act states use: "A copy of a written advance directive, revocation of an advance directive, or designation or disqualification of a surrogate has the same effect as the original." (§20-6-113) That makes this a findability state. The signed copy is the instrument; the work is getting it in front of the physician who determines capacity, because until that determination the agent has no authority at all (§20-6-103(c)). A directive does not bind EMS on CPR.