§ 137.010.Revocation

Revocation, and the three routes are deliberately easy to use.

Only a principal who is not incapacitated may revoke. That limit is the counterpart of the whole scheme — a document that takes effect on incapacity would be worthless if it could be revoked during incapacity.

First route: notifying a licensed or certified health or residential care provider of the revocation.

No writing is required, and no particular provider. Telling any licensed or certified provider revokes the declaration.

Second route: acting in a manner that demonstrates a specific intent to revoke.

That is an unusually open standard — tearing up the document, striking through it, or telling family in terms — and it is why the liability section protects a provider who acts under a declaration without knowing it was revoked.

Third route: executing a later declaration. The new document displaces the old without any separate revocation.

The ease of revocation is a deliberate choice. A person whose views on their own treatment have changed should not need a lawyer, a notary, or witnesses to say so.

Subsection (b) puts two immediate duties on a provider informed of or provided with a revocation. Record the revocation in the principal’s medical record, and give notice of it to any other provider the provider knows to be responsible for the principal’s care.

Both are required "immediately", and the second is what carries the revocation through a treatment team — a revocation known to one clinician and to nobody else would leave others acting on a document that no longer stands.