Advance Directives in Florida: The Three Documents Every Orlando Family Should Have

By Orlando Senior Advisor Care Team · August 13, 2026

Why this comes up the moment care changes

Almost every family we work with in Orange, Seminole, Osceola, and Lake counties hits the same wall at the same moment: a parent is in the emergency department at AdventHealth Orlando or Orlando Health ORMC, a decision needs to be made in the next hour, and nobody can produce a document saying who is allowed to make it. Assisted living communities ask for the same paperwork at move-in, and an AHCA-licensed facility will typically request copies for the resident's file on day one.

Florida law (Chapter 765, Florida Statutes) recognizes advance directives, and the three documents below cover the situations that actually arise. None of them require a lawyer to be valid, though an elder law attorney is worth the money if there is property, a blended family, or a Medicaid plan in the picture.

1. The health care surrogate designation — the one to do first

This is the document that names the person who can speak to doctors for your parent. In Florida it takes two adult witnesses, and at least one witness cannot be the spouse or a blood relative. It does not have to be notarized.

Two details families miss. First, Florida allows a surrogate designation that takes effect immediately, while your parent still has capacity — useful when someone wants help managing appointments and records now, not only after incapacity. Second, without a designation, Florida falls back to a statutory proxy list (spouse, adult child, parent, adult sibling, and so on). That default is workable, but if there are several adult children who disagree, the fallback is exactly where families get stuck. Naming one person, plus an alternate, prevents that.

2. The living will — your parent's own instructions

A living will states what your parent wants if they have a terminal condition, an end-stage condition, or are in a persistent vegetative state, and can no longer speak for themselves. It typically addresses life-prolonging measures such as ventilation, dialysis, and artificial feeding and hydration.

The surrogate designation names who decides; the living will tells them what your parent wanted. Having both is what keeps a surrogate from having to guess under pressure. Like the surrogate form, it needs two witnesses with the same restriction on one of them.

3. The DNRO — Florida's yellow form

A Do Not Resuscitate Order (DNRO, Florida Department of Health form DH 1896) is different in kind from the first two. It is a live medical order signed by a physician and by the patient or the patient's authorized representative, and it is the document Orange County EMS and paramedics look for when they arrive. Florida's version is distributed on distinctive yellow paper, which is why hospice nurses and ALF staff call it "the yellow form" and tell families to keep it on the refrigerator or with the patient during transport.

Two practical points. Florida does not run a POLST program the way some states do, so the DNRO is the operative out-of-hospital order here. And a DNRO only speaks to resuscitation — it does not decline comfort care, pain control, or transport. Because it is a physician's order, it comes from your parent's doctor or hospice team, not from a stationery store. Verify the current form and any signature requirements with the Florida Department of Health or the treating physician before relying on it.

Where these documents live once you have them

Signed and filed in a drawer is the most common failure mode. Give a copy to the primary care physician and to the assisted living or memory care community, upload them to the AdventHealth or Orlando Health patient portal your parent actually uses, and make sure the named surrogate has the originals or knows exactly where they are. Keep the DNRO physically with your parent, not in a safe deposit box.

Also revisit them. A directive signed in 2011 that names a surrogate who has since died or moved out of state is worse than useless in an emergency room — review the names every couple of years and after any major health event or move.

How this fits into a care decision

Advance directives don't decide where your parent lives, but they smooth almost everything that follows. Communities move faster on a placement when the paperwork is in order, hospital discharge planners can hand off cleanly, and a Medicaid application is easier to manage when one person clearly holds authority. If you're weighing assisted living, memory care, or in-home support in the Orlando area, getting these three documents settled first is the cheapest hour of planning you'll spend.

This article is general information about Florida law, not legal advice. For a specific situation — particularly one involving guardianship, contested capacity, or Medicaid asset planning — talk to a Florida elder law attorney.

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