When is a health lasting power of attorney useful?

It is useful in stopping the State from murdering your parent in a care setting such as a care home or hospital, to put it bluntly. It means you can act on your parent's behalf and are able to move them to a better care home at the point when your parent is judged to have lost mental capacity - and this is decided by the State and not you. Otherwise, the local authority aka social services will be colluding with the care home to decide what is best for them, not you or your parent. Ker-ching! Esp if you are self-funding, because you are subsidising council-funded care home residents to the tune of several hundred a week.

The elderly are placed on covert end-of-life care aka murder via dehydration and so on - this goes on in Surrey care homes, approved by Surrey County Council and I'm not even sure it's illegal as it's passive euthanasia. Any time you want to hold anyone to account over their wilful neglect, they will be tipped off to use the words 'Do you have LPA in Health and Welfare?' all cocky like. And if you say no, well, they've got you over a barrel.

You will not even be allowed to read your parent's medical notes.

It’s been useful for me and my sister - dad has dementia and although mum is next of kin she is struggling with the stress of it and making decisions. The LPA means the medical teams and GP will talk to us about his condition, his care, and ask us for decisions. This means it is less pressure on mum, even though she is still involved in the discussions. Whether it makes any difference in practice I don’t know but it certainly feels less stressful to have it there.

We found it helpful when we wanted to speak to a doctor on a parent's behalf. Some would only interact/answer questions from us ( without the parent being present - eg if you wanted to speak to a GP about a blood test result over the phone as we lived at a distance) once they had seen the power of attorney

I was told you need the H&W one to make decisions about going into a care home, for example, and which care home. But you need the finance one to actually pay for it!

I think the time it is useful is if there are various relatives with different ideas about care for the person concerned. The relative with health LPA gets to make the choice.

But aside from that I am not sure it's particularly useful. My mother had dementia and I had finance LPA for her but not H&W. I am an only child, there was no one else interested in her care. When she lost capacity I chose the care she received and did a DNA and Respect forms. All her medics and carers always consulted me, and said that me having H&W LPA would have made no difference. They took my views into account and we were in agreement about how her treatment and care.

In my experience the health POA was utterly useless. Medics made it very clear they would ignore my parent's wishes and do what they want. And they did.