Life-sustaining medical treatment

Mr CLARK (Box Hill) — The Journal of Law and Medicine has recently reported a tragic Victorian case where a patient had food and fluid withdrawn by doctors, leading to the person’s death, in violation of her Aboriginal cultural beliefs. This follows two previous appalling court decisions that feeding a person by stomach tube is medical treatment rather than the provision of food and water and thus can be terminated despite Parliament’s intention to the contrary, and that medical treatment can be withheld from a disabled person in order to bring about that person’s death without need for evidence the person would have wanted treatment withheld.

Over the course of the past 20 years we first said people should have the right to refuse life-sustaining treatment for themselves. Then we said others could refuse such treatment to give effect to their wishes.

Then it was said such treatment could be terminated without evidence of their wishes. Now some courts and doctors are saying that not only medical treatment but also the fundamentals of food and water should be withheld from patients, against the wishes of patients and their families, so as to bring about their death.

As ethicist Dr Leslie Cannold pointed out in the Age of 31 December, claims of so-called futility are being used by some doctors to trump the wishes of patients and families and to impose the doctors’ own views about the value of the patient’s life. For these patients and families so-called voluntary death with dignity has become compulsory death without dignity.

Elderly and frail Victorians are entitled to enter our hospitals with confidence that they will receive the treatment and care they need and want so far as medicine is able, rather than having to fight to obtain treatment from doctors who think they would be better off dead.

Title Life-sustaining medical treatment
House ASSEMBLY
Activity Members Statements
Members CLARK
Date 6 February 2008