Speaking as someone who had their career and marriage terminated by a life altering spinal injury, that was followed in the fullness of time by a hemorrhagic stroke. I broadly agree with the author and his article, which I find both cogent and persuasive!
Alan B.

This author follows his religious beliefs that life is preferable to all else, no matter what the suffering. He also wants to make sure that all others who don't agree with his views are also condemned to suffering right up to the bitter end.

Having worked with dying people for many years, including using 'best practice' palliative care of the highest effectiveness , I can assure you that there are still really awful painful deaths out there that also suffer from uncontrolled nausea, vomiting and fluid bowel motions right up until the bitter end.

All the while, these poor people are screaming for someone to end it all sooner, but no person or invisible God is able to help them. Until all these sorts of deaths can be avoided, then I , along with the overwhelming majority of Australians, will continue to advocate for voluntary euthanasia.

People like this author and his disciples are welcome to face any awful death right up to the bitter end, but have no right to force others to do the same.

The only folk trying to force their view here are the voluntary euthanasia advocates. People already have the option of creating a living will! All that is missing is removing criminal conduct on the part of practising doctors, who up levels of opioids to provide palliative comfort until it suppresses the life force. And far more common in our large hospitals than most folk would want to believe.

And who's able to say with complete certainty that some or any of the treatment meted out in aged care nursing homes is appropriate or even part of the problem and indeed some of the horror stories emanating from some of our nursing homes, where the focus was on maximised profits not best practice care?

Even today we find the overuse of antibiotics, and lack of basic cross infection prevention hygiene are widely reported?

Of course those in so called high care nursing positions want euthanasia, even as patients in their care withdraw their consent?

Moreover, given many of the ancient relics are no longer able to give informed consent, their cognitive abilities destroyed by big pharma's largest money spinner? Relatives who might well benefit as recipients are "persuaded to provide their proxy?

And we've all heard of overworked doctors signing off on patient's diagnosis, and medication delivery sight unseen?

Aged care is one area of a highly profitable industry (as much as a 22% premium that winds up padding the bank balances of foreign investors) that gets to bury their mistakes universally unquestioned?
Alan B.

The overuse of fluid tablets can cause nausea and vomiting, and just what you cause when medically acquired dehydration sucks absolutely critical protective fluid away from the brain? The preferred permanent cure? Euthanasia?

Overworked nurses deep into a 200 hour shift can and do get a little slack with essential cross infection prevention and often cranky and perhaps a little careless at being called out from an interrupted catnap to attend to a bedwetting elder?

I was call an effing B by a clearly enraged "carer", for having rung for a bottle and then been unable to use it, at will. Not all that unusual with spinal cord injuries! And yes I remember your name Nurse K. I once held onto my water as if it were gold for two days, even as the intravascular drip was forcing fluid into me.

My demented Father died in aged care. He was confined to his bed with a "management" catheter, (a pathway for renal infection) and contracted golden staph, due no doubt to lack of adequate cross infection prevention.

The nurses and assisting staff were just the nicest folk, and were very upset when the home lost its licence and their pay packets.
Alan B.

Alan, would you be fine and dandy if your right to refuse treatment or obtain painkillers was revoked? Because that's essentially what you're arguing for.

Since the proposed legislation is voluntary, those who seek an alteration in the law are forcing no one to do anything they do not wish to do.

200 hours, that`s some shift........
Keep religion out of it please.

There is a tiny chance (maybe 1%) that any one of us will die an awful suffering death. It's no-one's fault: it happens every day in Australia and will happen again with 100% certainty, because medicine will never be perfect and disease can be very cruel. It's just the epidemiology of disease.The question is what will our society will do about this suffering which is happening right now.
Around 80% of Australians consistently express the wish to have control of their own time of death when suffering becomes intolerable, and they make this decision for themselves. What the author can never justify is why he feels he can make this decision on my behalf.
When voluntary assisted dying and maybe gay marriage are finally accepted in our society, for the first time in 2000 years we will be able to live, love and die as we wish and according to our own ethical standards without the Catholic church, as the main anti-VAD lobbyist, butting in!

Old folk can't be allowed to drown in their vomit or have the bug in their system fed until they die of clinical dehydration? And snapping a rib as a consequence of coughing as you drown in your own vomit is just not fun!

While it's common enough, preventable with a care model that eats into the profit margin, and or a very limited budget?

And given a propensity of old folk to forget to remember good hygiene, they need to be isolated preferably before cross contamination infects the rest of the community, and a deity regime followed that literally starves the bug and improves their own immunity! And more cost effective than simply medicating the problem while feeding the bug with effective culture medium?

All meat and dairy products, ideally should be replaced for around 48 hours by black tea, burnt toast and honey only?

Rooms, bedding and furniture cleaned with raw bleach, steam and sunlight wherever practical.

One of my most enduring memories is of an elderly Grandfather who was not ready to go, being ejected from public hospital on the grounds they'd used up all the medical and budget options to treat his hopeless pneumonia.

We accepted him on the evocations of a distraught family who were not ready to say goodbye just yet either. And given adverse reactions to the then available antibiotics, we fought for him and his valuable to some, life, with round the clock postal drainage.

I was the one with the goldilock hands so I was the one tasked with the application of targeted and measured (pat pat)force, which usually resulted in half a mug of rubbish being coughed up.

It took three exhausting weeks to have him sitting up with the colour back in his cheeks surrounded by a loving laughing family whose gratitude knew no bounds.

I will carry that memory with me to the grave along with my opposition to a premature end reliant on confected reasons or invalid assumptions. If you want to end your life, it's your choice, go for it, who's stopping you?
Alan B.

Sorry, Alan. Was there supposed to be an argument against end-of-life choice somewhere in your rant about inadequate hospital services?

AlanB, if you want to rant and rave about how, apparently, all nurses are filthy money-grabbing creatures with no care for their patients, then allow me to rant and rave about paranoid, obsessed patients like you.
Anyone who suggests that dying patients should just knock themselves off rather than use legal euthanasia just has no idea at all.

With nursing and nursing homes, as in all professions, there are both good and bad staff and residents. Nasty, pompous, ignorant patients like you obviously were/are, is just one of the many reasons that nurses are leaving the profession in droves in Australia, and why the health department has to recruit heavily from non-English speaking countries.
Be very careful what you wish for....

How typical for those involved in so called aged care, to describe my post as a rant!

In the news this very morning was an expose of cruel and unusual treatment and serial elder abuse in many of our for profit nursing homes, where the aged are effectively are treated as brain dead morons without rights or simple human dignity?

No doubt hostility personified Susan and Amie will come to the rescue of the profit making management?

It can cost between $50.00 and $150.00 a day in government subsidized aged care. Generally speaking the $100'00 day cheaper, not for profit sector, is where the best care is given, I believe, by the best and most dedicated carers?

And yes there is a case for informed seniors, preferably before they have their cognitive ability is permanently impaired by aged care medication regimes, to have a right to refuse medication that has a bad reputation, like hemorrhagic poison warfram given to prevent clots even where it can in a deadly combination, create a virtual hemophiliac, who can literally bled to death from an unstoppable nose bleed?

Moreover, there are vastly superior but routinely withheld alternatives that might cost a few pennies more?

I am in favor of ending all government funding for the profit model and therefore, in favor of more of the less costly and superior, not for profit model; and where the $100.00 a day savings could be placed as additional aged care funding and presided over exclusively by the states? Who'd be less inclined to shove seniors out of hospital with their fractures still ununited and their conditions not reliably stabilized?

Wherever they're sent should still cost just one arm of government! It's called funding based on outcomes rather than providing service, which is often seriously insufficient?

I'd also advocate for the deployment of mandated CCTV to seriously curtail widely reported elder abuse and needed if ever serially abused elders are re empowered and able to take appropriate, evidence supported legal remedies! Yes, I'll be careful what I wish for!
Alan B.

While those abuses and cases of neglect are tragic, Alan, they do in no way amount to a case to deny people choice when life is worth living.

If vets and doctors can get access to a quick and painless death, why can't the rest of us?

Susan, Amie I have nothing but undying admiration for most of our nurses in most of our hospitals, for whom there will never ever be enough superlatives!

Yes I believe their should be choice, if its available as would be in a living will? I also believe routinely overdosing a patient with a lethal dose of opioids ought to be decriminalized.

I'm against charge nurses making life or death decisions that are seemingly signed off on by a registered doctor, who've never seen the patient?

As accepted custom? It's more common than most folks would allow themselves to believe!?

Things I've seen and can give eye witness accounts of, include an elderly lady, long time friend and former freedom fighter, who risked everything many times over, helping Australian POW's escape, being euthanized, without so much as by your leave or ceremony!

I was advised that it happens as accepted daily routine, as a clinical overdose given by an attending nurse with a key to a cabinet of oft times lethal drugs. And I was not Family!

I've seen dogs put down with more regret and less icy professionalism than I witnessed that day.

Then there was very valuable property owner, Bill, an MD and former Japanese POW, being bullied into a home far from family and friends.

Not everyone in attendance was silent. A senior nurse put her four bobs worth in, saying, you'll like it there Bill, they have a lovely duck pond! "PRIORITIES"!?

Another younger nurse just shook her head continually repeating, this's not right!

The two Ambos, who were going to provide transport, allegedly received a phone call summoning them to an emergency that disappeared, but only after Bill finally gave his grudging consent. Given a Nephew in law with power of attorney and a beneficiary was very definitely in the yes camp.

If there's money available to subsidize quite grossly profitable "private" health care, it should be diverted to provide far superior, more deserving outcomes than these eyewitness accounts!

A little and missing objectivity and less shooting the messenger would be useful Ladies!
Alan B.

AlanB, "'m against charge nurses making life or death decisions that are seemingly signed off on by a registered doctor, who've never seen the patient?"

You have no idea what you are talking about Alan. We don't have 'charge nurses' in hospitals anymore, they went out years ago. Any registered nurse can make a decision whether to give a prescribed medication to a patient or not.

It is currently unlawful for a doctor to write up, or a nurse to give, any end-of-life medications in Australia, so you are talking rubbish. Giving morphine to dying patients is lawful in the correct doses, and is very effective at making them comfortable in most cases. Yes, it makes it easier for them to relax and die. Nothing wrong with that.

As for all these old guys you think are bullied into going into nursing homes, well if you can come up with an affordable better solution for oldies who live alone and can no longer look after themselves, then please enlighten us?
Should we leave them on the floor in their homes after they fall and slowly die of cold and dehydration, alone and scared? Or should we leave them in beds in acute care hospitals while we tell other patients needing those beds that they will have to wait?

I think the patient should always retain the right to return home, if he or she is reasonably mobile and care is available. Okay, you got me, charge nurses are a thing of the past or confined to military establishments? [Not so dictatorial tin Hitlers,]

Even so, giving folk with just a nurse's degree given the apparent right to administer a lethal dose of prescription medicine om their own cognizance, is just not on.

I take your point about the need to move patients out of hospital beds, but not your apparent approval of them being effectively prevented from returning home, particularly if their home can be auctioned off to pay for something imposed on a patient, unmistakably against their will?

This was a man with a healthy bank account, a generous pension, and the means to pay for a level of personal care! His valuable property, was just a stones throw from the base hospital. And could have served as a billet for off duty nurses from overseas, who he already knew, liked and trusted, as opposed to affordable out of town accommodation and after a long commute being hit with savage parking fees?

If I were the only witness that knew this was wrong for the hugely traumatized old digger, maybe your case would fly; which given the unnecessary trauma was not a lot better in his still active and alert mind, than those four dark years of unending nightmare!

I see from the tone and tenor of your posts a perceived inability to actually empathize with the (overly opinionated) old nuisances committed to your care? And need to be seen for what they are depicted as? Overly expensive useless wastes of space, who've arrived at their use by date?

HE MIGHT FALL?

So might anyone else under the right circumstances!

The ambos knew it wasn't right as did the other senior nurse!

You just go on self identifying by arguing for budgets and expediency as priority, regardless of the patent abuse of elders and their rights, that it seemingly gives rise to?
Alan B.

Congratulations, Alan. You might as well argue for government-controlled marriage or job allocation.

Hey, at least Zyklon B didn't take weeks or months to kill its victims. You've made Nazis look compassionate when the alternative is your paternalistic fascism.

What's the go here, tag team elder abuse, and just because I have the unmitigated temerity to hold an unshakable contrary opinion?
Alan B.

Do you have a reason behind your opposition to choice, or is it just your fear of abuse?

Because let's face it. The current law IS being abused. People are being helped to die (and sometimes killed) against their will.

Paul Russell loves to say "If a law can be abused, it will be abused." But he never applied that standard to the laws against voluntary euthanasia and assisted suicide.

AlanB "Even so, giving folk with just a nurse's degree given the apparent right to administer a lethal dose of prescription medicine om their own cognizance, is just not on."

Now you are being hysterical Alan. If a registered nurse is found to have given 'a lethal dose' of any medicine to anyone, they would be prosecuted, and rightly so. No nurse or doctor is legally able to do this in this country, and if you have any proof of these mad allegations, then you need to report them to the relevant authorities.

DO you have any proof? If not, then stop the stupid comments about something you know absolutely nothing about. I have been in senior nursing positions in both public and private health care facilities, including palliative care, for over 30 years, and I have never seen anyone deliberately 'put down'. Have I just been in the wrong places while you, a really obviously non-medical person, have all this inside knowledge?

As for your elderly mate who was 'forced' into a nursing home, no one that I know has ever willingly said they would rejoice in going into residential care, and indeed only a few of our elderly end up in these homes. Most are cared for in their own homes by community care providers and either die at home or in hospital.

It is way cheaper for the government and the health system for people to remain in their own home. For all the pension and bond money the elderly pay to stay in these residential care facilities, our health system has to top-up the fees, for all the 24 hour care needed, by many thousands of dollars for each resident. If someone has to go into care, it is always for a very good reason, of which you may not be aware.