Page 993 - Week 03 - Thursday, 21 March 2019
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make laws in this regard for their citizens. I hope that the forthcoming federal election might lead to some progress on that, but I do not know.
More positively, there was a high degree of consensus about what the ACT Assembly should do if we ever got the right to legislate on voluntary assisted dying. It should include things such as the person should be over 18; the person has to be diagnosed with a terminal illness or a serious condition that could not be sufficiently relieved by palliative care; there is a time frame for their likely demise; the person needs to have independent assessment to ensure they are of sound mind; and the person has to be given adequate information about the scheme and the implications of their decision and access to counselling.
We heard of risks that potentially could not be mitigated: the risk to elderly patients of elder abuse—even without voluntary assisted dying legislation I am well aware it—and particularly financial abuse; risks to people with disabilities; allowance for any healthcare professionals who may quite reasonably not wish to be involved in this; and how to ensure that any healthcare workers have access to the appropriate training facilities, support and counselling. Of course, there is the very important recommendation that, if this is to happen, we need to increase funding for palliative care.
The other thing I should mention is that in about two months Victoria will commence its scheme and it probably would be prudent to have a look at some of the experiences in Victoria before embarking on a whole new scheme.
Some members of the committee did not think there was any possibility of a workable voluntary assisted dying scheme and thus there was no consensus on that. However, there was consensus on a lot of other things related to end of life. It was clear to the committee that while voluntary assisted dying is one potential end of life issue, there are other issues and they are fairly complicated, given that both the aged-care and the health system have considerable commonwealth involvements. Some of our recommendations looked at what the commonwealth should do.
We made 24 recommendations. The first nine of them covered advance care directives. For those of you who have not been involved in this, an advance care directive basically says, “I am currently of sound mind and I may or may not be in good health but at some point in the future when there are medical issues and I may not be of sound mind, this is what I would like to have happen.” It is a fairly new concept and potentially has a lot of nuances. We made lots of recommendations, including training representatives for the CALD community and creating a way for hospitals and healthcare institutions to find advance care directives if they are made, because we are aware that that is an issue.
We would like to see a Medicare item for doing an advance care directive. Ideally you will be doing this in conjunction with your GP and it will take them time to do that. Currently there is not a Medicare number for that. We also talked about doing more work on this via COAG. This is really important work that needs to be done for all of us. I do not have an advance care directive, but we probably all should have one.
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