Aged care facilities and hospices can block access to voluntary assisted dying, despite it being legal in your state.
- Associate Professor of Medicine, Deakin University
Under the Commonwealth Criminal Code, it’s an offence to use a ‘carriage service’ — which includes phone, videoconferencing or email —for the purposes of conveying ‘suicide related material’.
Evidence suggests messages the patient thought to be crystal clear often appear unclear to doctors and family.
Most people in western societies die in hospital or in institutional care. Keeping death out of sight and out of mind means few people have real experience of death and dying.
We all die eventually, of course, but these days it’s very hard for doctors and loved ones to let patients and relatives die without doing “whatever it takes”.
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