Thursday, June 23, 2011 HBO Program Dissects Oregon's Experience with the Death with Dignity Law
In 1994, Oregon became the first state to legalize physician-assisted suicide. As a result, any individual whom two physicians diagnose as having less than six months to live can lawfully request a fatal dose of barbiturate to end his or her life. Since 1994, more than 500 Oregonians have taken their mortality into their own hands. In How to Die in Oregon, filmmaker Peter Richardson gently enters the lives of the terminally ill as they consider whether - and when - to end their lives by lethal overdose. Richardson examines both sides of this complex, emotionally charged issue. What emerges is a life-affirming, staggeringly powerful portrait of what it means to die with dignity
See more at http://www.hbo.com/#/documentaries/how-to-die-in-oregon Wednesday, June 08, 2011 Consumer’s Tool Kit for Health Care Advance Planning
This is a resource I have been sharing with my clients for years. As I tell them when we discuss the use of Advance Medical Directives, the only thing worse than not having an Advance Medical Directive and appointing an Agent under your Health Care Power of Attorney, is to appoint a Health Care Agent and never talk to them about how you would make medical decisions if you had the capacity to! This Toolkit helps you to plan by getting you to think about specific health care situations you may find yourself in.
End of life decisions are too important to put off. Address them now, with your loved ones while you still have capacity to think about the situations and decide the path you want to take. Don't leave the decision making to a spouse or children; it's your life and your values, make you decisions now so that if the time comes, your Agent will be carrying out your wishes!
http://www.americanbar.org/groups/law_aging/resources/consumer_s_toolkit_for_health_care_advance_planning.html Saturday, March 06, 2010 National Health Care Decisions Day is April 16
Despite recent gains in public awareness of the need for advance care planning, studies indicate that most Americans have not exercised their right to make decisions about their healthcare in the event that they cannot speak for themselves. The National Healthcare Decisions Day event will help Americans understand that making future healthcare decisions includes much more than deciding what care they would or would not want; it starts with expressing preferences, clarifying values, identifying care preferences and selecting an agent to express healthcare decisions if patients are unable to speak for themselves. The National Healthcare Decisions Day (NHDD) initiative is a collaborative effort of national, state and community organizations committed to ensuring that all adults with decision-making capacity in the United States have the information and opportunity to communicate and document their healthcare decisions.
Source: NHDD National (February 2010)
More information/how you can participate: http://www.nationalhealthcaredecisionsday.org/
Stay tuned to the blog as we hope to plan an event around National Health Care Decisions Day! Wednesday, January 27, 2010 Physicians Often Fail to Communicate with Dying Patients on End-of-Life IssuesMost doctors don't talk about end-of-life issues with their cancer patients when those patients are feeling well, a new survey has found. Nor do they talk about them until treatments have been exhausted. Those delays mean patients might not be able to make truly informed choices early in their treatment. The study, published online Jan. 11 in the journal Cancer, surveyed 4,188 physicians about how they would talk to a hypothetical cancer patient with four to six months to live. A majority of respondents (65%) said they would discuss prognosis, but only a minority said they would discuss do-not-resuscitate status (44%), hospice (26%) or preferred site of death (21%) at that time. Rather, they would wait until symptoms were present or until there were no more treatments to offer. Current guidelines, from the National Comprehensive Cancer Network, a not-for-profit alliance of 21 of the world's leading cancer centers, say that such conversations should be initiated whenever a patient has been given less than a year to live, if not at diagnosis. Doctors gave various reasons for not following the guidelines. Some didn't want to dash patients' hopes; some wanted to continue treating patients. In addition, said lead author Dr. Nancy Keating of Harvard Medical School: "There's at least some evidence to suggest that patients don't want to hear about these things."
Source: Los Angeles Times (January 25, 2010)
Full story: http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-he-closer25-2010jan25,0,5766082.story |