KRS 311.621 to 311.643 · Kentucky
Kentucky: how to sign your advance directive
Kentucky has one document and it does both jobs. §311.623(1) lets a single writing direct that life-prolonging treatment be withheld or withdrawn, direct the same for artificially provided nutrition and hydration, name a surrogate to make health care decisions, and give an anatomical gift. The prescribed form is headed Living Will Directive, and the surrogate designation sits inside it — the Attorney General's packet titles the whole thing Living Will Directive and Health Care Surrogate Designation.
Why WearableDocs
Wherever you are, the directive has to be reachable
A signed advance directive that cannot be produced when someone asks for it fails in practice. WearableDocs stores yours and makes it open in seconds from a card you already carry.
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 Kentucky asks
What you need to sign in Kentucky
- Instruments
- One living will directive carrying both functions — treatment directions, artificial nutrition and hydration, a surrogate designation, and an anatomical gift (§311.623(1))
- Form
- Substantially mandatory — §311.625(1), "shall be substantially in the following form"
- Execution
- Two or more witnesses OR a notary — and witnesses must be in each other's presence (§311.625(2))
- May not witness
- A blood relative; a beneficiary under the descent and distribution statutes; an employee of a health care facility in which you are a patient, unless that employee serves as the notary; your attending physician; anyone directly financially responsible for your health care (§311.625(2)(a)–(e))
- May not be your agent
- An employee, owner, director or officer of a health care facility where you are a resident or patient — unless related to you within the fourth degree of consanguinity or affinity, or a member of the same religious or fraternal order (§311.625(4))
- Who decides
- Your attending physician and one other physician. Both "permanently unconscious" and "terminal condition" are determined "solely by the patient's attending physician and one (1) other physician" (§311.621(13), (17))
- Registry
- None
- Age
- 18 — "adult" means 18 or older and of sound mind (§311.621(1))
- Pregnancy
- Yes — written into the form. "If I have been diagnosed as pregnant and that diagnosis is known to my attending physician, this directive shall have no force or effect during the course of my pregnancy." (§311.625(1))
- Oral instructions
- No — the directive is written. §311.623(1) creates a "written living will directive", and §311.621(6) defines a directive as one "in writing"
- Carried device
- Yes — for the DNR wish only, and only on a Board-approved form. See below
- Citation
- KRS 311.621 to 311.643
Read from the enacted statute, 2026-09-18.
The instrument
What Kentucky actually recognizes
Then the feature most people do not know about: the form is substantially mandatory. §311.625(1): a living will directive "shall be substantially in the following form." Kentucky is one of the few states in this set that says that.
Execution is either/or, and the witness route carries a condition that is easy to miss: two or more adults witnessing "in the presence of the grantor and in the presence of each other," or acknowledgment before a notary (§311.625(2)). Witnesses who sign separately, on different days, have not executed this document.
What a Kentucky directive is not is a DNR order. The wish not to be resuscitated is recognised on a separate, Board-approved form, and nowhere else.
What the popular guides get wrong
Corrections for Kentucky
"You do not have to use the state's form." The Attorney General's own packet says: "You are not required by law to use these forms. Different forms, written the way you want, may also be used." That is not what §311.625(1) says. The statute says a living will directive "shall be substantially in the following form". A Kentucky document that states the same wishes in different words is not the instrument the section asks for — and the packet's own form is the statutory one, section by section.
"Relatives, heirs, health care providers and guardians can't witness." That sentence is in the packet too, and it is broader than the statute. §311.625(2) disqualifies five classes and no more: a blood relative; a beneficiary under the descent and distribution statutes; an employee of the health care facility where you are a patient, unless that employee is the notary; your attending physician; and anyone directly financially responsible for your care. Your guardian is not on that list. Neither is a physician who is not attending you.
Carried on you
What a WearableDocs card does in Kentucky
Kentucky is one of the states where a carried device has real statutory force — and it is the narrowest version of that rule in the set.
Notification to an emergency medical responder or paramedic of "a person's authentic wish not to be resuscitated shall be recognized only if on a standard form or identification approved by the Kentucky Board of Medical Licensure, in consultation with the Cabinet for Health and Family Services." (§311.623(3))
"Only if" is doing the work. A card you print at home, a bracelet bought online, a folded copy of your directive in your wallet — none of them are the thing the section recognises. In Kentucky the DNR wish travels on the Board-approved form or identification, or on a Board-approved medical order for scope of treatment, and on nothing else.
All of that belongs to the DNR wish. Your living will directive — the document that names your surrogate and states your wishes about treatment — gets none of it. No Kentucky provision gives the directive force because it is carried or worn, and a directive does not bind EMS on CPR in any state. The EMS instrument is a different paper.
What Kentucky does say, in the Attorney General's packet, is that moving the directive is your job and not the system's: "You are responsible for telling your hospital or nursing home that you have a Living Will." That is the findability case, stated by the state rather than by us — and it is the one Kentucky claim a card can actually improve.