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Palliative care aims to relieve suffering and improve the quality of life for those who are living with, or dying from, an illness. While all palliative care aims to help the patient be as comfortable as possible, some interventions carry the risk of causing death.
Palliative care has only been available as a medical discipline since the 1960s. Practitioners have learned many things about the appropriateness of treatment through all stages of dying. However, palliative care is still in its infancy and has not yet received the full attention of federal legislation. As such, there are few rules for providing palliative care. A lack of consistency in the existing rules can also create uncertainty for healthcare providers.
Everyone in Canada is entitled to respectful medical treatment at the end of life. What this treatment entails will depend very much on the disease, the wishes of the patient, the resources available to the healthcare team, and the availability of psychosocial and spiritual support.
As a patient, or a proxy, you can ask for palliative interventions to ease discomfort. You can ask for counselling and spiritual guidance. However, you may not be able to get some or any of these if your healthcare team does not have access to them. Furthermore, some care facilities do not provide certain treatments as a matter of policy.
This part of the End-of-Life Project website explains what potentially life-shortening palliative interventions are, whether it is legal to give palliative interventions that may shorten life, and where Canada and the provinces stand on the provision of potentially life-shortening palliative interventions. This part also explores the practice of total/terminal sedation. |
