The Canadian Press
Jessica Smith Cross
TORONTO–Ontario is setting up a new service for people seeking medically-assisted death that will allow them to reach out for help directly, bypassing health-care providers who object to assisted suicide on conscience grounds.
Health minister Eric Hoskins says a “care co-ordination service” for medically-assisted death will be up and running as early as May.
The service will allow patients to contact central staff, who will connect them with health-care providers prepared to handle requests for a medically-assisted death.
“That patient, or their family members or their caregiver, would have the ability to be in contact with the care-co-ordination service directly,” Hoskins noted.
“They would then, through that process, that phone call or e-mail, be linked into all of what’s required,” he added.
“If they chose medical assistance in dying, they would be able to follow that through to completion.”
The new service will come roughly a year after medically-assisted dying was made legal in Canada.
According to the minister’s office, 365 Ontarians chose to end their lives with medical help between June of 2016, when assisted dying became legal, and March 30, 2017.
In June, the Ministry of Health had set up a line for doctors to call to refer patients to physicians willing to work on assisted-death cases.
Doctors are required by the province’s College of Physicians and Surgeons to make a referral if they are unwilling to handle a patient’s request personally.
However, physicians with moral and religious objections to assisted dying have told the provincial government they don’t want to make that call because they see it as helping their patients end their lives.
The advocacy group, Dying with Dignity, has been tracking cases where patients have faced road blocks to accessing assisted death.
For example, the group uncovered documents about a patient who was at the Catholic Hotel Dieu Hospital in Windsor, Ont. and had requested a medically-assisted death.
Hotel Dieu had refused to perform the procedure, and the Windsor General Hospital refused to accept the patient transfer, so hospital staff reported the patient had been “left without options,” the group said.
The Windsor Star reported the patient died of natural causes in hospital before a health-care provider could be found to help.
Hoskins said that situation would have been avoided if a care-co-ordination service had been available for the patient to access directly.
