Getting on with life while dying
ASKING people with about a year to live for their thoughts on assisted dying opened the door to some profound conversations, a University of Otago researcher says, and the challenge now is to communicate her findings.
Dunedin Medical School department of general practice and rural health research fellow Jessica Young is compiling and analysing patients’ views, and is presenting a snapshot of her thesis as part of the Three Minute Thesis (3MT) competition at the university on Friday.
Ms Young, halfway through her PhD, hoped her research would be used to inform the political debate around euthanasia, as well as being helpful to patients and medical professionals.
Ms Young found her interview subjects after putting a call out via media outlets and online, choosing 14 out of 27 people who came forward. Her youngest interview subject was only 36.
One surprising aspect of her interviews was the extent to which people accepted their impending deaths — and that had enabled them to get on with life, Ms Young said.
They discussed the purpose of life, including meaningful connections to other people, spirituality, religion and nature. ‘‘They’d done a lot of thinking.’’ Experiences of the health sys tem, pain, and what their families went through seeing the patients suffer were also discussed. She also interviewed some family members, and was very grateful for everyone’s participation.
The End of Life Choice Bill — giving people with a terminal illness or a ‘‘grievous and irremediable’’ condition the option of requesting assisted dying — has passed its first reading in Parliament and is before a select committee.
There are a total of seven PhD finalists and six Master’s finalists this year in the Otago round of the 3MT competition, selected from 80 applications. Topics range from poetry, to gout, commerce and pneumonia.
The competition will be held at 5pm on Friday in the Castle 2 lecture theatre.
The winning Master’s candidate will go on to the 2018 Masters 3MT InterUniversity Challenge at the University of Canterbury later in August, and the winning PhD candidate will go to the 2018 AsiaPacific 3MT Competition in Queensland.