Quality of life and death a national talking issue
The “quality of death” of elderly Australians – the highly emotional issue of prolonging life needlessly – is now being debated by senior health managers after the National Health and Hospital Reform Commission recommended a new system for “advance care planning” where patients state which treatments they desire as they approach death.
The proposal is similar to the controversial move by United States President, Barack Obama, with his health reform plan when right-wing American critics attempted to condemn it by describing the move outlandishly as “Obama’s death panel”.
Two of Melbourne’s hospital chief executives, Brendan Murphy of Austin Health and Christine Kilpatrick of the Royal Children’s Hospital, have said that there needed to be a national conversation to improve the so-called “quality of death”.
Dr Murphy told The Age newspaper that “I often sit in on meetings we have about complex patients with long stays and sometimes I think ‘what have we done, why are we pushing on?’
“It is done with the best of intentions but if you sat back and thought about it a bit, you’d say for what purpose? Sometimes the clinicians don’t have the confidence. Sometimes it’s easier to say let’s keep on doing everything rather than having those discussions with the families saying we think this has gone far enough”.
Professor Kilpatrick said that often families faced with having to make a decision about a loved one “don’t know what to do so they just say ‘keep going, keep going’. In the pediatric world we have children with all sorts of disabilities and we can keep the children alive now, so that is a discussion about quality of life”.
