Assisted-death protocol urged after hospital patient refusals

The Erie St. Clair Local Health Integration Network wants to improve how physician-assisted dying is handled in the region, following a recently revealed dispute that happened last fall when Hotel-Dieu Grace Healthcare refused a patient’s request and Windsor Regional Hospital refused to accept the patient transfer.

“Our attempt is to do what we can to improve the situation,” LHIN board chairman Martin Girash said Tuesday.

He said his motion requests a medically assistance in death (MAID) committee — recently created by the Erie St. Clair Community Care Access Centre — iron out a protocol with local organizations that deal with requests from patients. Girash wants all these hospitals, hospices and long-term care homes to agree to this new protocol in written agreements.

“So that prior to the request being made, that there will be a smooth handling of the situation, as opposed to an ad hoc handling which has happened in the past,” Girash said.

The board approved his motion, with some members suggesting that organizations that are publicly funded shouldn’t refuse patient requests for a procedure that was made legal last year under certain conditions.

But Girash said Ministry of Health guidelines allow organizations to exempt themselves if they have religious or moral objections, though they can’t just abandon the patient. They’re required to take action to ensure the patient is connected with a professional who agrees to honour the request.

The Catholic-based Hotel-Dieu Grace, which has the area’s only hospital-based palliative care unit, was faced with that responsibility last fall after it refused a request from a terminally ill patient. That patient became a “hot potato” as the hospital attempted to accommodate his request by finding another location, and Windsor Regional refused to accept the transfer.

The patient ended up withdrawing the request and later died, without assistance, at Hotel-Dieu. CEO Janet Kaffer told the Star that if the patient hadn’t withdrawn, the hospital would have been forced to transfer the patient outside of Windsor.

On Tuesday, some LHIN members said that transferring dying patients from one place to another is not a “patient-focused” approach.

“We should not automatically think that moving from one organization to another is in the best interest of the patient,” Girash said, particularly when moving a patient from a non-acute hospital to the “chaos of an acute-care facility.”

Also on Tuesday, LHIN endorsed a request from Leamington District Memorial Hospital to change its name to Erie Shores Health Care, something that still has to be approved by the Ministry of Health.

Earlier in the day, there appeared to be a surge of community opposition to the idea, but LHIN board members were emphatically in favour of the name change. The hospital argues the new name better reflects its changing role, as it becomes a health-care hub for Kingsville, Leamington, Essex, Harrow and Wheatley.

The Leamington hospital was also approved for $300,000 in one-time funding. Windsor Regional received one-time funding of $500,000 to help it cope with money pressures due to last year’s problems with sterilization equipment and the current surge in patients that has forced it to accept many more patients.

Patient became a ‘hot potato’ as the hospital attempted to accommodate his request by finding another location.