Va. Code § 54.1-2981 et seq. · Virginia
Virginia: how to sign your advance directive
Virginia has one combined advance directive. §54.1-2983 lets an adult, at any time, make a written directive that may specify the health care they do or do not authorize, appoint an agent, and specify an anatomical gift — three functions, one document, no election between them. The suggested form is at §54.1-2984 and it is genuinely optional: "may, but need not, be in the following form."
Why WearableDocs
In Virginia, 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 Virginia asks
What you need to sign in Virginia
- Instruments
- One combined advance directive — health care instructions, an agent, and an anatomical gift in a single document. The Durable Do Not Resuscitate Order is expressly a separate instrument (§54.1-2987.1)
- Form
- Illustrative — §54.1-2984: "may, but need not, be in the following form"
- Execution
- Two subscribing witnesses, no notary (§54.1-2983)
- May not witness
- Nobody. §54.1-2982 defines a witness as "any person over the age of 18, including a spouse or blood relative of the declarant", and adds that employees of health care facilities and physicians' offices "who act in good faith, shall be permitted to serve as witnesses." Virginia disqualifies no one
- May not be your agent
- BLANK — no agent-eligibility bar was captured
- Copy rule
- No copy-equivalence rule found. What exists is a records duty: §54.1-2983 requires the attending physician who has been notified to make "the advance directive or a copy of the advance directive, if written" part of the medical record
- Delivery
- A duty on the declarant. §54.1-2983: "It shall be the responsibility of the declarant to provide for notification to his attending physician that an advance directive has been made." Anyone else may notify the physician once the declarant is comatose, incapacitated or unable to communicate
- Who decides
- The attending physician, and a capacity reviewer where certification by one is required by law — after a personal examination, certified in writing before health care is provided, continued, withheld or withdrawn, and every 180 days thereafter while the need continues (§54.1-2984, form)
- Registry
- Yes — the Advance Health Care Planning Registry, Article 9 (§54.1-2994 et seq.), referenced in §54.1-2983. Submitting the directive is the declarant's choice
- Age
- 18 — "Any adult capable of making an informed decision"
- Reciprocity
- For the DNR order, yes — §54.1-2987.1(C) deems a DNR order or other life-prolonging-procedures order executed under another state's law valid and gives it effect. No reciprocal-recognition provision for the advance directive itself was captured
- Revocation
- For the DNR order: §54.1-2987.1(D) — the patient's expression of a desire to be resuscitated revokes the provider's authority to follow the order, and "in no case shall any person other than the patient have authority to revoke" it. No advance-directive revocation section was captured
- Oral instructions
- Yes, narrowly. §54.1-2983 permits an oral advance directive by an adult "diagnosed by his attending physician as being in a terminal condition", made in the presence of the attending physician and two witnesses
- Carried device
- Nothing for the directive. Durable DNR jewelry is a purchasing standard, not a reliance rule — see below
- Citation
- Va. Code § 54.1-2981 et seq.
Read from the enacted statute, 2026-09-18.
The instrument
What Virginia actually recognizes
Sitting outside it is the Durable Do Not Resuscitate Order, §54.1-2987.1. It is a separate instrument with a separate statute, it requires a physician with a bona fide physician-patient relationship, and §54.1-2987.1(D) gives the patient — and only the patient — the power to revoke it by saying so.
Virginia is also the most permissive state in the set on the question of who may witness, and it says so in a definition rather than in the execution section.
What the popular guides get wrong
Corrections for Virginia
"Your relatives can't witness." In Virginia they expressly can. §54.1-2982 defines a witness as "any person over the age of 18, including a spouse or blood relative of the declarant", and the same definition provides that employees of health care facilities and physicians' offices "who act in good faith, shall be permitted to serve as witnesses." A Virginian who hunted for two unrelated strangers did work the statute does not ask for — and may have concluded, wrongly, that a directive witnessed by family was invalid.
"The bracelet tells EMS what to do." Virginia's carried-device rule is 12VAC5-66-50, and it is a purchasing standard. It says the jewelry must be "uniquely-designed, uniquely-identifiable, and available only from a seller approved by the Office of EMS"; that only the patient or the person authorized to consent may buy it; and that it must display the words Do Not Resuscitate, the patient's full legal name, the physician's name and telephone number, and the Virginia Durable DNR issuance date. It says nothing about what a responder must do on seeing it. Describing this regulation as an EMS duty reads into it a rule that is not there — and a guide that does so is telling a Virginian their bracelet compels treatment that no Virginia regulation says it compels.
Carried on you
What a WearableDocs card does in Virginia
WearableDocs is how your Virginia advance directive gets found. Virginia splits the work: a DNR order travels on regulated jewelry, and the directive travels on a duty owed by the declarant — a carried advance directive gets no legal force. Article 8 has no bracelet, necklace, wallet-card or display provision, and no copy-equivalence rule. What it has instead is a duty on the declarant — §54.1-2983 puts the notification of the attending physician on the person who signed the document, and provides a fallback so that anyone else may notify the physician once the declarant can no longer communicate.
Virginia's carried-device rule belongs to the Durable DNR Order, and the honest description of it is narrower than it looks. §54.1-2987.1(E) authorises qualified EMS personnel and licensed practitioners to follow Durable DNR Orders "that are available to them in a form approved by the Board of Health." The jewelry regulation, 12VAC5-66-50, then decides what the jewelry must look like and who may sell it. Neither provision says a bracelet by itself compels a clinician. The force in Virginia runs through the order — a physician's order, on a Board of Health form — and the jewelry is an approved way of carrying notice of it. A §54.1-2987.2 was not captured; the code's table of contents runs from §54.1-2987.1 to §54.1-2988.
So the split is the familiar one: the DNR order travels on a device, the directive travels on paper, and Virginia's statute moves the burden of getting that paper to the physician onto the person who signed it. That is not a mechanism the card replaces. It is the job the card does.