When Someone Needs to Take Control

By Care For You •

Guardians and conservators: When they are appointed, what they do, and when their responsibilities may come to an end.

An Interview with Nathan Neal.

What is adult guardianship?

In the District of Columbia there are actually two types of guardians for adults. One, known as a guardian, mainly makes health care decisions on behalf of another person. The other, known as a conservator, is responsible for managing a person’s money and paying his or her bills. Conservators are only appointed when there are significant assets that need to be managed. Guardians are appointed when a person needs health care or other decisions made for his or her well-being: buying clothes, making living arrangements, giving consent for medication or hospitalization. A guardian will also look after a person’s finances when there aren’t a lot of assets to be managed.

Who names a guardian or a conservator, under what circumstances?

A guardian is appointed by the court when a person is found to be incapacitated. A guardian or conservator is an arm of the court itself, because the judge is too busy to look after every person’s decisions. Payment comes from the ward’s assets if the court decides those assets are sufficient and approves the charges. If a ward doesn’t have sufficient assets, the guardian is paid from a public fund.

The definition of “incapacitated” is very broad. It means that a person is unable to receive or evaluate information effectively or communicate decisions as to care, to the extent that the person is not able manage some of his or her financial resources or meet some requirements for physical health or habitation. Guardians might be appointed for people who suffer from Huntington’s disease, for example, or have mental health problems, or are simply in a coma without family members around to make decisions and without a living will.

The referral might be made by a hospital, a social worker at the Department of Adult Protective Services, or even a family member, if the person is an adult and out of control.

Apart from the person’s death, how can a guardianship arrangement end?

Several things can happen. A family member could step forward to become guardian. The guardian could resign or be fired. Or the guardian- or conservatorship can be terminated by the court because the person is deemed fully capable of caring for him- or herself. That could happen because, for example, a person has mental health issues and is given a guardian or conservator while he or she is off medication. When the person goes back on medication, the guardianship can be ended. Once the guardianship is put in place, though, the court has to end it.

Do guardians generally look after one person or several?

Currently I am guardian or conservator for twelve wards. There is a roll of 100 to 150 attorneys who have signed up with the District of Columbia to be guardians or conservators. The court requires four nights of training on the guardianship process and six hours of continuing legal education a year. It chooses only members of the bar because sometimes people get into predicaments that require a lawyer’s help. For example, I have one ward whose granddaughter swindled the house out from under her, mortgaging it for $200,000. We’re working to see how much of that asset we can recoup. That’s work that requires a lawyer.