By Indy Senior Advisor Care Team · September 11, 2026
Indiana law gives family a fallback for medical decisions when a parent never signed anything. It does not give you authority over money, a lease, or an assisted living contract. Here is where that line falls and what to do about it.
The document nobody signed
The call usually comes from a hospital room. A parent has had a stroke, or a fall, or a delirium episode on top of dementia that everyone had been quietly working around. A discharge planner asks who holds power of attorney. And the adult child on the phone realizes the honest answer is nobody.
This is more common than families expect. Plenty of people in their eighties have a will and nothing else, because a will is the document that gets talked about at church and at the funeral home. A will does nothing while a person is alive. It is an instruction for after death.
What matters now is a different question: who is legally allowed to decide, and decide what. Indiana answers that question in two very different ways depending on whether the decision is medical or financial, and the gap between those two answers is where most Indianapolis families get stuck. Knowing where the line falls before you walk into a care conference will save you days you do not have.
Indiana does give you a fallback — for medical decisions only
Here is the part that surprises people. Indiana does not leave a hospital guessing. If an adult is incapable of consenting and has not appointed anyone, IC 16-36-1-5 sets out a ranked list of who may consent to health care on that person's behalf.
The list starts with a judicially appointed guardian of the person, then works down through family: a spouse, a parent, an adult child, an adult grandchild, an adult sibling, a grandparent, and finally the nearest other adult relative in the next degree of kinship. The order matters, and the statute carries conditions and disqualifications that a summary cannot capture, so read the current text of the section or have a lawyer read it with you rather than relying on a blog post — including this one.
Whoever is authorized this way is required by the same statute to act in good faith and in the best interest of the person who cannot consent. That is a real legal standard, not a formality.
So if your only question is whether a hospital can talk to you and whether you can agree to a treatment plan, Indiana has probably already answered it, and nobody needs to file anything in court. That is genuinely good news, and it is worth saying out loud to a sibling who is panicking on the phone.
What the consent ladder does not give you
Now the hard part. IC 16-36-1-5 is about consent to health care. It is not a power of attorney. It does not make you the signer on a bank account, it does not let you cash a pension check, it does not let you give notice on an apartment, and it does not let you sign a residency agreement with an assisted living community.
That last one catches almost everyone. Indiana licenses assisted-living-type communities as Residential Care Facilities under 410 IAC 16.2-5, and an RCF is going to want a signature on a residency agreement from someone with legal authority to bind the resident — along with the required disclosures that come with it. Being the adult child who is authorized to consent to a medication change does not make you that someone. We wrote separately about what an Indiana assisted living contract has to disclose, and every item on that list assumes a valid signer.
Be careful here in the other direction too. If a community hands you a contract and points at a line marked responsible party or financial guarantor, understand what you are signing before you sign it. Signing in your own name, rather than in a representative capacity you actually hold, can expose you personally. That is a question for a lawyer, not for an admissions director and not for us.
The same gap shows up when the money question arrives. Applying for Indiana's PathWays Waiver or for RCAP room-and-board assistance means producing bank statements, account histories, and asset documentation for someone who can no longer authorize the bank to release them. Our walkthrough of how PathWays and RCAP fit together assumes you can get at those records. Without authority, you often cannot.
If there is still capacity, do the paperwork this week
Capacity is not a light switch. A parent who cannot manage a checkbook may still clearly understand who they trust to speak for them. A parent who is confused at 8pm may be entirely lucid at 10am. Indiana law is concerned with whether the person understands the specific act they are performing, and that is a narrower question than whether they have a dementia diagnosis.
If there is a window, use it. Two different documents do two different jobs. An advance directive under IC 16-36-7 can designate a health care representative, who under IC 16-36-7-36 has authority to make health care decisions the declarant would have made, to consent where written consent is required including a physician's order not to resuscitate, and to be given access to health information. A financial power of attorney under IC 30-5 is the separate document that deals with money, property, and contracts.
Execution formalities are not optional. Under IC 16-36-7-28, an advance directive must be signed in the declarant's presence by two adult witnesses, at least one of whom may not be the spouse or other relative, or signed or acknowledged by the declarant before a notarial officer. Someone who signs the declarant's name may not also be a witness, the notary, or a designated health care representative.
One warning about forms. Indiana's advance directive rules were consolidated into IC 16-36-7 as of the 2021 code, so a living will form printed out of a drawer years ago, or downloaded from a national website, may not track what Indiana now requires. Have an Indiana attorney look at whatever form you plan to use. This is the cheapest lawyer visit you will ever pay for, and it is dramatically cheaper than the alternative described next.
Guardianship: where you file and what it involves
When capacity is gone and no documents exist, the remaining path is guardianship under IC 29-3. A court declares an adult incapacitated and appoints someone to decide for them. The appointment can cover the person, the estate, or both — guardian of the person handles care and living arrangements, guardian of the estate handles money and property. Families often need both and sometimes split them between two siblings.
In Indianapolis, adult guardianship is filed with the Probate Division of Marion Superior Court, in the City-County Building at 200 East Washington Street. Under IC 29-3-5-1, any person may file the petition, and it has to state the name, age, residence and address of the adult alleged to be incapacitated. Marion County maintains its own local probate rules and its own forms, which differ from other Indiana counties.
Venue follows the person, not the hospital. Where the petition belongs is governed by IC 29-3-2-2, so a parent who lives in Carmel generally has a Hamilton County case even if they were admitted to a hospital downtown, and a Greenwood parent generally has a Johnson County case. If your family is spread across the six counties CICOA serves, confirm venue with counsel before anyone files anything — filing in the wrong county costs weeks.
Expect a hearing. Marion County's local probate rules require a hearing on any petition seeking guardianship over an adult alleged to be incapacitated, and either that adult is present at the hearing, or the petitioner presents sufficient medical evidence that appearing would injure their health or safety. That medical evidence takes time to assemble, which is the honest reason guardianship is a bad emergency plan and a reasonable long-term one.
Guardianship is also ongoing. A guardian reports to the court and stays accountable to it. That is a feature — it is the oversight that protects the person — but it is not a one-afternoon errand, and families should hear that plainly before they start.
When there is no family to appoint
Some of the hardest cases in this metro involve an older adult with no spouse, no children, and no one willing to serve. Indiana built a program for exactly that situation. Under IC 29-3-8.5, counties can operate a Volunteer Advocates for Seniors and Incapacitated Adults program, known as VASIA, in which an approved local organization is appointed guardian and uses trained, supervised volunteers to carry out the duties.
In Marion County, the VASIA program is run by the Center for At-Risk Elders (CARE), approved by the Marion County Probate Court. A CARE volunteer advocate maintains regular contact with the person, directs their health care, attends and participates in care plan conferences, and works to keep the services being delivered appropriate to that person's quality of life. CARE staff support the volunteers.
CARE is explicit that it cannot accept every referral and applies case-acceptance criteria, so this is not a universal safety net. Referrals generally come through professionals — a hospital social worker, an APS caseworker, a facility administrator — rather than from a neighbor calling in.
Statewide, the Adult Guardianship Office under the Indiana Supreme Court oversees VASIA programs. The office was established with legislative funding in 2013, and in 2025 it awarded $1.3 million in matching funding across 50 Indiana counties, supporting programs that serve more than 800 vulnerable adults. It is a small program relative to the need, and worth knowing exists.
Running the discharge clock at the same time
None of this happens in a quiet week. It happens while a hospital is telling you a parent is ready for discharge and asking where they are going. Our 72-hour discharge walkthrough covers the general drill; here is what changes when no documents exist.
First, separate the two clocks out loud. The medical consent question is probably already answered by IC 16-36-1-5, so say that to the discharge planner and move on. The signing-a-contract question is the one that will actually hold up a placement, and it is worth raising on day one rather than at the lease signing.
Second, call CICOA Aging & In-Home Solutions, the Area Agency on Aging for Marion, Hamilton, Hendricks, Johnson, Boone and Hancock counties. The Resource Center line is 317-803-6131, toll-free 800-432-2422. CICOA does not provide legal representation, but it knows the local landscape, and it is the front door for waiver case management once authority is sorted out.
Third, know the other two numbers. If you believe an older adult is being neglected, exploited, or abused, Indiana's Adult Protective Services line is 1-800-992-6978 — APS is statewide and regional, not county-run, so there is no separate Marion County number to hunt for. If your concern is a licensed facility's conduct, that is a different complaint: the Indiana Department of Health line is 1-800-246-8909, and IDOH notes that line often reaches voicemail and points people to its online complaint form. The long-term care ombudsman, reachable statewide at 800-622-4484, is a separate and often faster resource for resident-rights problems; see how the ombudsman process works.
Fourth, do not let anyone rush you into signing something you do not have authority to sign because it is Friday afternoon. A short delay in a placement is recoverable. A contract you personally guaranteed is harder to undo.
What we can help with, and what we cannot
We are senior care advisors. We can tell you which communities in Marion, Hamilton, Hendricks, Johnson, Boone and Hancock counties take the level of care your parent needs, which ones hold PathWays or RCAP agreements, and what the tour and contract questions should be. That part is free and it is what we do.
We are not attorneys and nothing here is legal advice. Whether your family needs a health care representative designation, a financial power of attorney, a guardianship petition, or some combination is a legal question with real consequences, and an Indiana elder law attorney is the right person to answer it. Many will do a short consult to tell you which of those four you actually need, which is often the only question you have.
If you are reading this at 11pm with a discharge scheduled for Tuesday, the sequence is: confirm who can consent medically, identify who can sign financially, ask a lawyer whether a window of capacity still exists, and call us about the placement while that is being sorted. Those can run in parallel. They usually have to.
