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Advance Directives

While receiving care at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, you will need to make many decisions regarding various aspects of your medical treatment. The best medical decisions for you involve both expert advice from doctors, nurses and other clinicians, as well as your personal beliefs and values. Communicating those beliefs and values in a situation when you cannot do that for yourself is the purpose of advance care directives, which include health care proxies and living wills.

To obtain a copy of a health care proxy form, please call a Dana-Farber social worker at (617) 632-3301 or a patient representative at (617) 632-3417.

The National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization also offers health care proxy and living will forms for each state on its Caring Connections Web site.

Visit Caring Connections

Personal Profile

Patti Branowicki

Photo of Patti Branowicki

As an experienced nurse, Patti Branowicki knew about the physical and emotional turmoil that cancer inflicts on patients. What she didn't know was what it actually felt like to have the disease. That all changed last winter, however, when she was diagnosed with Stage III ovarian cancer.
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