Hi. It’s Graham Martin from Kingsbridge Wills and Trusts. It’s now Friday evening. I just got back from a meeting and went to see a client and I knew she’s already got LPAs, which is great, so I went to discuss wills and trusts. But I started talking a little bit more about the LPAs and I said how long have you had them?

He said well I’ve had them for about four or five years. Her husband has them as well and I said where’s the documentation? “We don’t know” and I said have you nonetheless spoken to your GP surgery to make sure they’re registered with the NHS Trust? And she said “no, not at all. We didn’t know we had to.”

So she’s labouring under the impression that just because she had the forms filled out, she paid a fee and she registered them, that the OPG, the Office of the Public Guardian, the government body up in Birmingham, who actually do the work and the validation, would contact their local NHS trust. That’s not the case. I’m finding this more and more when I go and talk to people where they’ve got LPAs, they actually haven’t been told. There’s this final piece of the jigsaw that you absolutely must do, which is that you get the documents, you ring your doctor surgery, and you say I need to register this with the NHS trust. You might need to go into them or you might be able to do it online through a link on their website, but this is really, really crucial because otherwise, if you think you are somebody’s attorney or you have somebody to be an attorney for you, if you haven’t notified the NHS, indeed if you move location, a different trust to different trust, so if you’re for example in North London, you move to South Yorkshire, you’ve got to re register with your NHS trust.

Otherwise, the doctors won’t know to ring your attorney and therefore you’ll be looked after, I’m sure, adequately well, but mostly people would like somebody else to be able to have an opinion and maybe say no to life sustaining treatment. This also occurs with the bank. You must speak to your bank and let them know, maybe your insurance company, your mobile phone provider as well, that if you’ve got an attorney or you are an attorney, that the people actually know, because just having the documentation just isn’t good enough. So if you want to talk to me about LPAs, happy to take your call or an email. So it’s Graham Martin from Kingsbridge Wills and Trusts.

My number is 02083646789. If you wanna drop me an email, it’s [email protected]. It’s a lovely evening and I hope you’re gonna have a great weekend because I certainly am. Goodbye.