A new study on medical aid in dying in Quebec is sparking conversation about whether patients are receiving enough information in palliative care consultations.

The MUHC study looked into 80 patient files of people who requested and received medical aid in dying (MAID), and it found that a good portion of them received palliative consultations as little as seven days or fewer before requesting medical aid in dying.

People in palliative care are typically consulted about the full scope of their end-of-life care options.

It is important to note that these patients were very ill and in many cases in severe pain; researchers stress that this is not a condemnation of medical aid in dying, but a starting point for further discussion on how the process unfolds.

Researchers discovered that in some cases, people who requested medical aid in dying continued to receive life-prolonging care for a time.

While it seems like a paradox on the surface, there could be reasonable explanations for those cases, explained Lori Seller, ethics advisor for the Centre for Applied Ethics at the MUHC.

“Patients have to able to consent to MAID from the very time that they make the request right of to the moment they receive MAID,” she said. “So some of these life-prolonging treatments may also have been necessary to keep the patients awake and aware so that they could actually give informed consent at the time of MAID.”

The study’s findings necessitate further research and further discussion to improve the process of end-of-life care, and they highlight the importance of timely and earlier palliative consultations, said Seller.

“Another interesting thing that we realized is that the kinds of patients who ask for MAID are the patients who, in some cases, are seeking some form of control over their illness. So when you think about it in that light, they may have been going along with all their life-prolonging treatments and only reached a point where they were told the treatment isn’t working… and at that very moment in order to control something about the circumstances of their death, they make their request for MAID.”

 

Watch Seller's interview in the video above for more.