20 Pa.C.S. §5401 et seq. · Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania: how to sign your advance directive
Pennsylvania has a living will and a health care power of attorney, and — unusually — it says in the statute that you may combine them: §5433(b), "may be combined into one document." The state publishes samples of both, and of the combined version.
Why WearableDocs
In Pennsylvania, 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 Pennsylvania asks
What you need to sign in Pennsylvania
- Instruments
- Living will · health care power of attorney · a combined version the statute expressly permits (§5433(b))
- Form
- Illustrative
- Execution
- Two witnesses, no notary
- May not witness
- Nobody, with one exception — the person who signs on your behalf may not witness. Pennsylvania disqualifies no one else. A spouse, a relative, an heir, a provider's employee acting in good faith: all permitted
- May not be your agent
- Your attending physician or provider; a facility owner, operator or employee — unless related to you
- Copy rule
- The copy is not the equivalent — it is the trigger. §5454(a)
- Delivery
- Yes, a precondition. Operative "when: (1) a copy is provided to the attending physician"
- Who decides
- One attending physician
- Standard determined
- Capacity
- Trigger overridable
- Yes
- Registry
- None
- Age
- 18, or a high school graduate, or married, or emancipated
- Reciprocity
- Yes — §5464, disjunctive
- Pregnancy
- Yes — §5429, detailed
- Revocation
- Divorce revokes on the filing of the action, not on the decree
- Provider may not require
- §5433(a)(2) — a provider may not require notarisation, may not require the provider's own form, and may not make a directive a condition of care
- Carried device
- Yes — for the DNR order. EMS "shall comply" on examining a bracelet, a necklace or the order (§5487(b)(1)). Nothing for the directive
- Citation
- 20 Pa.C.S. §5401 et seq.
Read from the enacted statute, 2026-09-18.
The instrument
What Pennsylvania actually recognizes
Pennsylvania then does something no other state does as cleanly. The document does not operate until a copy reaches your doctor. §5454(a): it is operative "when: (1) a copy is provided to the attending physician."
Not "should be provided." Not "a copy is as good as the original." The copy arriving is the trigger. A Pennsylvania directive that is signed, witnessed and sitting in a drawer is not doing anything yet.
That single feature is why Pennsylvania is the clearest page in this cluster for the product claim, and why the page has to state it without overselling it.
What the popular guides get wrong
Corrections for Pennsylvania
"Your relatives can't witness." Pennsylvania is the most permissive state in the set on this point: it disqualifies no one except the person signing on your behalf. Spouses, children, heirs and provider employees may witness. A Pennsylvanian who hunted for two unrelated witnesses did unnecessary work, and may have signed something they were told was invalid when it was not.
"A copy is as good as the original." True in Wisconsin and Hawaii. In Pennsylvania the copy is not equivalent to the original — it is the event that starts the document. Reading the copy rule as a formality is the mistake.
Carried on you
What a WearableDocs card does in Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania has the strongest EMS language of any state for a DNR order:
EMS "are authorized to and shall comply with an order if made aware of the order by examining a bracelet, a necklace or the order itself" (§5487(b)(1)), and §5487(d) recognises out-of-state devices.
"Shall comply" is mandatory, and it is triggered by examining the device — the physical act of looking at it. Pennsylvania also supplies the honest default for the ambiguous case: providers who in good faith are uncertain about the validity of an order, bracelet or necklace "shall render care." The device does not create doubt; where doubt exists, treatment continues.
All of that belongs to the DNR order. Your living will and your health care power of attorney get none of it.
But Pennsylvania is where the directive claim is strongest anyway, for a different reason. Because §5454(a) makes delivery the trigger, a Pennsylvania directive that has not reached the attending physician is not merely hard to find — it has not started. The card is not competing with a bracelet statute here. It is doing the one thing the statute says has to happen.