R.I. Gen. Laws §23-4.10-1 et seq. · §23-4.11-1 et seq. · Rhode Island
Rhode Island: how to sign your advance directive
Rhode Island keeps its two instruments in two separate chapters, with two different execution rules — and the split is the thing to get right.
Why WearableDocs
In Rhode Island, 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 Rhode Island asks
What you need to sign in Rhode Island
- Instruments
- Two, in separate chapters — declaration (§23-4.11) and durable power of attorney for health care (§23-4.10)
- Form
- Illustrative for both
- Execution
- Declaration: two witnesses, not related to you by blood or marriage — no notary option. Power of attorney: a notary OR two witnesses
- May not witness
- Power of attorney: your agent or alternate agent; a health care provider; a provider's employee; a community care facility operator or employee
- May not be your agent
- Your treating provider; a non-relative employee of your treating provider; a community care facility operator or their non-relative employee
- Copy rule
- None found
- Delivery
- No — the directive does not wait on delivery to a clinician to operate.
- Registry
- None
- Age
- 18
- EMS rule
- **§23-4.10-3(c) — for EMS personnel, the absence of reliable documentation "shall constitute a revocation" of the power of attorney**
- Carried device
- **§23-4.11-14 is titled "Instructional bracelets" — and the corpus contains no body text for it.** See below
- Citation
- R.I. Gen. Laws §23-4.10-1 et seq. · §23-4.11-1 et seq.
Read from the enacted statute, 2026-09-18.
The instrument
What Rhode Island actually recognizes
The declaration (§23-4.11) states your wishes. Two witnesses, neither related to you by blood or marriage, and no notary option.
The durable power of attorney for health care (§23-4.10) appoints your agent. A notary, or two witnesses.
Rhode Island is also generous about reliance: "all durable power of attorney forms are presumed valid, and physicians, health care providers, and emergency medical services personnel may rely on them, unless otherwise notified." That is a real protection, and it is stated more strongly here than in most states.
Then §23-4.10-3(c) takes most of it back.
Carried on you
What a WearableDocs card does in Rhode Island
Rhode Island is the second of the two states in this set where the carried document is a liability, and its rule is the most hostile found anywhere:
"For emergency medical services personnel, the absence of reliable documentation shall constitute a revocation of a durable power of attorney." (§23-4.10-3(c))
Not a suspension of the duty to follow it. A revocation. For EMS, not having the paperwork does not leave your agent's authority intact pending verification — the statute treats the authority as gone. Rhode Island is the one state where arriving without the document is worse than the document never having existed in the first place.
And Rhode Island appears to have seen the problem. §23-4.11-14 is titled "Instructional bracelets." A section contemplating exactly this — a directive carried on the person, to answer the absence §23-4.10-3(c) penalises.
The corpus does not contain its text. What the section requires, permits or limits is not established here, and this page does not guess. What can be said is that Rhode Island's legislature wrote a section heading that anticipates the product, and that its content is the single most important thing to read before this page ships.
Until then the honest statement is narrow: Rhode Island is a state where the document needs to be with you, and the statute says what happens when it is not.