Assisted-death doctors hold national meeting

VANCOUVER (CP) — Doctors who provide assisted death are meeting for the first time since the service became legal in Canada to discuss how some eligible patients are not getting the help they need to end their lives because of confusion over one phrase in the rightto-die law.

Dr. Jonathan Reggler, a family physician in the Vancouver Island community of Courtenay, said he has helped about a dozen people die since last June.

Reggler, a member of the Canadian Association of Medical Assistance In Dying Assessors and Providers, said physicians and other health-care professionals are gathering in Victoria on Friday and today to discuss a set of adopted clinical guidelines based on their shared experiences.

The one-year-old law that allows doctors to end the lives of people whose natural death is “reasonably foreseeable” is the subject of a constitutional challenge by two terminally ill women who say they’ve been denied the service because their death is not imminent.

Reggler said guidelines developed by the association that represents “hundreds” of health-care practitioners providing assisted death across the country include a recommendation to replace the term “reasonably foreseeable” with “reasonably predictable.”

Clinicians use the term predictability when assessing the course of a disease based on a patient’s condition and other factors including age and frailty, he said.

“‘Reasonably foreseeable’ is not a term used in clinical medicine,” he said,

“There is enough expertise within the profession, and particularly within (the association), that we can move away from doctors turning to lawyers to help them understand what it means and start to see it as ordinary clinical practice,” he said of medically assisted death.