ORS 127.505–127.660 · Oregon
Oregon: how to sign your advance directive
Oregon's advance directive is definitionally combined. You cannot file one that only states instructions, and you cannot file one that only names an agent. The statute requires both halves in the same document, and it requires them in substantially the prescribed form — the form is mandatory, not a sample.
Why WearableDocs
In Oregon, a signed directive in a drawer is not enough
The statute makes delivery — or getting the document into the medical record — part of what switches the directive on. A relative who might know which drawer is not a plan. WearableDocs stores the document you signed and puts it on a page that opens when someone scans your card, so the person who needs it can build the record while there is still time.
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 Oregon asks
What you need to sign in Oregon
- Instruments
- One, and it must contain both — a directive with only instructions is not permitted
- Form
- Mandatory — "must be in substantially the following form"
- Execution
- Two witnesses OR a notary
- May not witness
- Your attending physician or provider; your representative or alternate representative; in long-term care, one witness must be designated by the facility
- May not be your agent
- Your attending provider or their employee; a facility owner, operator or employee unless appointed before admission; in some cases a parent or former guardian
- Copy rule
- None — no copy-equivalence provision found
- Delivery
- Yes, a precondition. "No duty to give effect … unless the provider has received a copy" (ORS 127.575)
- Who decides
- The attending provider
- Trigger overridable
- Yes — the document may set its own trigger
- Registry
- None
- Age
- 18
- Form stability
- Reviewed every four years by statute (ORS 127.533)
- Carried device
- Nothing for the directive
- Citation
- ORS 127.505–127.660
Read from the enacted statute, 2026-09-18.
The instrument
What Oregon actually recognizes
Oregon also has the only statutory review cadence in the fifty-one. ORS 127.533 requires the Advance Directive Advisory Committee to review the form "not less than once every four years" and report to an interim committee by 1 September of an even-numbered year.
That matters for a reason beyond trivia: Oregon's form is a document the state expects to change, on a schedule, in public. A form downloaded once and never revisited is the failure mode the statute anticipates.
Carried on you
What a WearableDocs card does in Oregon
Oregon's answer is a delivery precondition (ORS 127.575), and it is one of the states with no copy-equivalence rule — being carried gives a directive no legal force. There is no bracelet, no card, no facsimile provision attached to ORS 127.505–127.660.
What Oregon has instead is the plainest delivery rule in the country:
A provider "has no duty to give effect to any instrument unless the provider has received a copy." (ORS 127.575)
Read that carefully, because it is narrower than it sounds and stronger than it looks. It does not say the directive is invalid without delivery — it says no one is obliged to act on it. A provider who never receives it has no duty, and a duty is the only thing that makes a directive do work in a hospital.
So Oregon joins Pennsylvania and Michigan in the small group where the product claim is not about findability or convenience. The document must arrive. Whether it arrives before the moment it is needed is the whole question, and it is the one thing a card in a wallet changes.