Page 2958 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 14 August 2013
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In May this year, the ACT Local Hospital Network Council held an end-of-life and decision-making forum in a world cafe-style consultation. Remarks have already been made about that today. But it seems to me that this was an invaluable forum. It included a broad range of discussions around the various end-of-life pathways. This is something which does not get much broad community discussion as it is often seen as somewhat taboo. Yet most of us have had elderly relatives who have had to deal with these very real issues. I think the simple holding of the event, in light of that sense of taboo and the difficulties around the issue in itself, was a very positive action.
The forum’s recommendations added to that. They were very useful in that they identified a range of actions that need to be carried forward. They include the need for increased community engagement and awareness about end-of-life care and advanced care planning, including targeting a range of culturally and linguistically diverse communities. It also included legitimating and resourcing advanced care planning, including training staff in the area, which is exactly what the Greens election initiative and the parliamentary agreement item is targeting.
As I said earlier, there is a huge concern that there was really only one part-time staff member in the ACT whose job it was to ensure that hospital staff knew about advanced care planning. Obviously, training more staff in this area, not just at TCH, is key. Training a broad range of staff across hospitals and aged-care facilities to be able to have direct conversations with individuals and their families about death and dying and to recognise key decision-making points is a valuable service.
The roundtable also identified clarifying the law around the legal framework for advanced care planning to create simpler legally binding tools to enable advanced care planning. A common framework and common documents will help all involved in this area. It would ensure that advanced care plans are easily available and recognisable and that these plans are recognised and respected. Creating a way for these documents to be transferable across facilities and health practitioners is also an important action necessary in this area.
The last recommendation relates to enabling futile care to be legitimately recognised. People deserve the right to be able to state when they do not want particular care anymore, and for clinicians to be able to cease that care and redirect patients to palliative or end-of-life care. These are obviously very difficult issues for many people in the community, but it is an area of great importance which we must not be afraid of discussing, because in discussing it and being open about that, being transparent, enabling people to have time to consider these issues, makes these difficult issues less difficult, in my view.
I also take this opportunity to quickly raise the issue of the ACT Older Persons’ Assembly. Australia’s first Older Persons’ Assembly was held here in the Legislative Assembly in 2011 as a result of a motion brought forward by Ms Bresnan in 2010. It provided both MLAs and government with an opportunity to hear firsthand the issues of concern to older Canberrans and for these issues to be debated in a public setting.
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