The Foothills Country Hospice will be a provisioning site for medical assistance in dying (MAID) starting early 2020, following a vote by the board.
After forming a committee last November, the Country Hospice board has spent the last six months gathering information before voting on May 15 to reverse the 2017 decision to not offer physician assisted death to patients.
“The reason we decided not to do it initially (in 2017) was because we wanted to gather as much information as we could so we could make a reasonable choice based on our facility,” said Dawn Elliott, executive director at the hospice. “When we made our first decision not to become a provisioning site, we did that with the intent that we would revisit that decision a few years down the road, so that’s why we revisited it (at the town hall meeting).”
The May 4 meeting was to provide an opportunity to learn about MAID and to have conversations regarding the evolution of the service, ethical implications, as well as concerns or considerations. The board voted on the matter, based on information gathered and on discussion from the meeting, on May 15.
“As a board, we determined that allowing MAID to be performed at the hospice was in the best interest of the patients there,” said David West, incoming board chair. “Ultimately focusing on those we serve, to the patients who come to the hospice for end of life care, where this is just one more component to end of life care that the hospice offers now.”
As a provisioning site, the hospice is not involved in the decision to grant a person medical assistance in dying, as that process is through the Medical Assistance in Dying care co-ordination service.
According to the AHS, to qualify for the service, a person must be a medically competent adult, have a grievous and irremediable medical condition whose natural death is reasonably foreseeable, and provide multiple levels of consent.
The most common health conditions of people granted MAID include cancer, MS and ALS.
“It’s important to acknowledge that there’s a wide-range of perspectives on this, and this is the reason we took such a long time to look at this,” said West.
The board voted almost two years ago in 2017 to not be a provisioning site after a year of deliberation following the legalization of physician assisted death in Canada in 2016.
“A year and a half later we decided that we need to revisit this policy and see if there’s new information, see if there’s new opinions, perspectives, information that we can gather to see where we’re at,” said West. “That’s where we’re at today, recognizing that there’s no unanimous perspective on this, we have wide-ranging opinions, but the board, collectively, voted in favour of reversing the policy to allow MAID to be performed [in early 2020].
“It’s our hope that we can continue to work together as a community to keep the hospice the great facility that it is.”
The board has put a moratorium in place until the first quarter of 2020, giving the hospice over seven months to work out the best practices for providing the service.
“Our hope is we will rely on some outside ethics experts, and we have experts in the community who are well positioned to be able to speak to this, to help the hospice to implement policies and procedures to lessen the impact,” said West. “We know that there are opposing viewpoints on this, so we want to make sure that it’s done respectfully and carefully.”
The varying opinions on the service were not taken lightly by the hospice in this decision, said West.
“There’s a delicate balancing of rights and obligations and duty between the families we serve, the staff, the volunteers, [and] the community partners. The Hospice is really an integral part of the community,” he said. “We had input from staff members, from volunteers, we had the town hall meeting in early May and we had community engagement, we had more than 100 people come out.
“They had questions, they had comments, opinions, and that was all important information for us to gather to synthesize, to get a sense of where people were at, where we as board members were at, and kind of look at it from all angles.”
For more information on the MAID service in Alberta, go to www.AHS.ca/MAID. For additional information on the Foothills Country Hospice, go to www.countryhospice.org.
[yop_poll id="49"]
