Trust professionals, financial planners, and lawyers are increasingly supporting clients who are aging alone, socially isolated, or without strong support systems in place to help navigate serious illness and incapacity.
While financial and legal plans may be in place, many clients — and their representatives — remain unprepared for the real-world realities of healthcare and personal care decision-making during a crisis.
Plan Well Guide’s Incapacity Support Partnership+ adds the healthcare and personal care expertise that may be missing from a client’s existing support network.
Working alongside trust professionals, financial planners, lawyers, healthcare providers, representatives, and other trusted supports, we help prepare clients for the healthcare and personal care realities of serious illness and incapacity.
Through Advance Serious Illness Planning (ASIP), representative preparation, healthcare navigation, and ongoing guidance, we help ensure the client’s values, wishes, and quality-of-life priorities are understood, documented, and ready to guide future decisions.
If a serious illness or healthcare crisis occurs, clients and their representatives also have access to experienced guidance from internationally recognized intensive care physician and Navigator Dr. Daren Heyland, helping them navigate difficult healthcare decisions with greater confidence and clarity.
The result is a more complete support team — prepared to protect what matters most to the client across the financial, legal, healthcare, and personal care dimensions of incapacity.
Through a structured, evidence-informed process, clients clarify their healthcare values, quality-of-life priorities, and preferences so representatives are better prepared to navigate serious illness and incapacity.
Help clients prepare for the healthcare realities of serious illness—not just the legal and financial aspects of incapacity.
Bridge the gap between legal documents, financial preparedness, and real-world healthcare decision-making.
Draw on the experience of Plan Well Guide's Navigator team and critical care physician Dr. Daren Heyland when complex situations arise.
Enhance the client planning experience by helping clients feel informed, prepared, and confident before a healthcare crisis occurs.
Traditional incapacity planning often focuses on legal documents such as Powers of Attorney and province-specific healthcare decision-making agreements alongside important financial safeguards like critical illness insurance.
These tools are essential — but documents alone do not prepare someone for the real-world realities of navigating serious illness, healthcare decision-making, and personal care advocacy during a time of incapacity.
In practice, representatives are often suddenly asked to:
When no trusted or prepared advocate exists, the situation can become even more difficult.
Clients who are aging alone or living with limited support systems may be at increased risk of:
As professionals increasingly support clients through complex aging and incapacity situations, an important question is emerging:
Learn how the partnership works, which clients may benefit, and how our team can help you support clients before, during, and after a serious illness. Select a topic below to learn more:
Professionals can work with Plan Well Guide in a variety of ways — from simply referring clients to Advance Serious Illness Planning (ASIP) and Navigator Support services, to more fully integrating advance serious illness planning into client onboarding and incapacity planning processes.
By incorporating Advance Serious Illness Planning into broader client conversations, professionals can help clients feel not only legally and financially prepared, but better supported to receive medical and personal care aligned with their values, wishes, and quality-of-life priorities during times of incapacity.
Interested in learning more?
Book a complimentary 15-minute introductory call with Plan Well Guide to explore how Advance Serious Illness Planning and the Incapacity Support Partnership+ can help strengthen incapacity planning and support vulnerable clients before crisis occurs.
Book a complimentary 15-minute call to learn how Plan Well Guide partners with trust companies, lawyers, and financial planners to provide proactive healthcare planning and ongoing support for vulnerable clients.
We'll provide a service agreement and invoice. Once your partnership is in place, we'll onboard your team and provide turnkey tools, resources, and guidance to help you confidently introduce the service to appropriate clients.
When you identify a client who may benefit from additional support—such as someone aging alone, socially isolated, or without a strong support system—you simply introduce the service. Once your client chooses to participate, we'll take it from there.
Your client works one-on-one with a Plan Well Guide Navigator to complete their Advance Serious Illness Plan. Together, we explore their values, healthcare preferences, possible health scenarios, and what quality of life means to them. Their wishes and priorities are documented in a comprehensive plan designed to guide future healthcare and personal care decision-making.
Where appropriate, we collaborate with your client's legal advisor to help ensure their legal documents support ongoing involvement from Plan Well Guide, should their representative require guidance in the future.
We meet with your client and their chosen representative to review the Advance Serious Illness Plan, clarify roles, and discuss how everyone will work together if a healthcare crisis occurs. This helps ensure the representative feels informed, prepared, and supported before difficult decisions need to be made.
If your client experiences a serious illness, loss of capacity, or other significant healthcare event, Plan Well Guide continues to support them. Dr. Daren Heyland is available to provide behind-the-scenes clinical guidance as you support your client, or to work directly with your client and their representative when additional expertise is needed.
Healthcare preferences and life circumstances can change over time. We meet with your client annually to review and update their Advance Serious Illness Plan, ensuring it remains current and continues to reflect their wishes.
Plan Well Guide’s Serious Illness Support Service is designed to support professionals working with clients who may be vulnerable during serious illness, incapacity, or healthcare crises due to limited or strained support systems.
This may include:
It may also include clients who:
For example, a widowed client without children may ask a trusted neighbour to act as their representative. While the neighbour may deeply care about the client, they may also feel uncertain about taking on such a significant responsibility during a medical crisis. Navigator support can help both the client and representative feel more informed, supported, and prepared before a crisis occurs.
These situations are becoming increasingly common across legal, financial, and trust planning environments.
Planning professionals may want to refer clients to Plan Well Guide’s Serious Illness Support Service when clients:
Recognizing these vulnerabilities early can help identify clients who may benefit from additional healthcare planning and advocacy support.
Critical Care Physician and Founder of Plan Well Guide
Dr. Daren Heyland is an internationally recognized intensive care physician, research scientist, and the Founder of Plan Well Guide. With more than 30 years of experience supporting patients and families through serious illness and healthcare crises, Dr. Heyland brings deep expertise in critical care decision-making, advance serious illness planning, and healthcare system navigation.
As Physician Navigator, he provides experienced guidance and support to clients and representatives navigating complex healthcare situations, helping ensure care decisions remain aligned with the client’s values, wishes, and quality-of-life priorities.
Brandi Bailey is a Plan Well Guide Navigator, Advance Serious Illness Planning (ASIP) specialist, and end-of-life doula with nearly 10 years of experience supporting individuals and families through planning, serious illness, caregiving, and end-of-life care.
She brings compassionate guidance, practical planning support, and calm coordination to the Navigator Support process, helping clients and representatives feel more informed, prepared, and supported during difficult healthcare conversations and planning situations.
Legal documents such as Powers of Attorney and province-specific healthcare decision-making agreements are essential, but they primarily identify who will make decisions if a person becomes incapable. What is often missing is meaningful preparation around how those decisions should be made during serious illness and healthcare crises.
Advance Serious Illness Planning (ASIP) helps fill this gap.
Plan Well Guide takes a structured, evidence-informed approach to Advance Serious Illness Planning. Clients are first provided with education to help them better understand the healthcare and personal care decisions they may face. Scientifically validated tools are then used to help them explore and clarify their authentic values and quality-of-life priorities before identifying their informed healthcare and personal care preferences.
These wishes are captured in practical planning documents that can help representatives and healthcare teams understand and advocate for what matters most to the client. Each client receives a personalized wallet card with a QR code linking to their securely stored plan, helping ensure their wishes and preferences can be accessed when they matter most — including during an unexpected healthcare crisis.
Plan Well Guide’s Incapacity Support Partnership+ helps strengthen incapacity planning through:
Advance Serious Illness Planning facilitation
Structured exploration of healthcare values, personal care preferences, and quality-of-life priorities
Education to support informed healthcare preferences
Representative onboarding and preparation
Guidance navigating and coordinating care during serious illness
Secure, accessible documentation of the client's wishes
By combining evidence-informed planning, accessible documentation, and ongoing healthcare navigation support, professionals can help ensure that clients are not only legally and financially prepared for incapacity, but that the people responsible for their care have meaningful guidance to understand and advocate for what matters most to them.
When clients experience a serious illness or loss of capacity without a clear support structure in place, the consequences often extend far beyond healthcare impacts alone.
Professionals may suddenly find themselves navigating unclear family dynamics, supporting overwhelmed representatives, or working alongside clients whose financial, legal, and personal care plans are no longer functioning as intended. In some situations, there may be no obvious person available to coordinate care decisions, communicate consistently with professionals, or advocate for the client’s wishes during a healthcare crisis.
This can create challenges such as:
For professionals who have spent years helping clients prepare for the future, it can be deeply concerning to see an otherwise thoughtful plan become difficult to carry out because healthcare decision-making and advocacy planning were not adequately addressed.
Supporting Clients Through Complex Incapacity Situations
Supporting Clients Through Complex Incapacity Situations