It’s September, and Stacey Hume is next to her dad’s hospital bed in the palliative ward of Edmonton’s Grey Nuns Community Hospital. She, along with her mom and sister, are told by staff that they need to make a choice about her dad.
Either contend with him possibly dying at a red light, alone in the ambulance, or remain in the hospital, where “it could be three, four or five more days of him hanging on like this,” recalled Hume.
Her dad, William Hume, was dying. He had been diagnosed with late-stage gastroesophageal cancer just a few months earlier. William wanted MAID, and was assessed and approved soon after he was diagnosed.
But the procedure is prohibited at Grey Nuns, where William was admitted, as it was the only Edmonton hospital with an ER bed available. The hospital is operated by Covenant Health — a publicly funded, Catholic health-care provider in Alberta — which does not allow MAID to be administered at any of its sites. William would have to be transferred to another facility.
So, in Quebec, according to this article, they passed a law requiring facilities to let it happen on-site.
That’s all that needs to happen, a hospital has any specific equipment on hand, and be willing to let in a doctor who is OK with it.
I agree with you, that no individual person should be forced to kill someone, but a hospital isn’t a person and doesn’t have feelings. There’s a very reasonable chance someone works there who would have been OK with providing MAID, but doesn’t, and even if 100% of the doctors there weren’t OK with it, it’s a lot simpler to have a doctor travel than it is to arrange a whole new bed, ambulance, on-site doctor, and family.
To me at least, that IS negligence. It’s not a violation of any individual’s beliefs that MAID happens in their general vicinity, and it’s just not true that requiring a facility to allow it results in requiring individuals to perform it.
Also, less relevant, it’s not necessarily that the vehicle can’t keep the patient alive, it’s just that there is a chance of the patient passing at any time, and that time might be during transport in an ambulance that is designed for emergencies first and doesn’t accommodate families.
Yeah, in my diagonal read, I don’t think I captured that the facility was refusing MAID solely on religious grounds. That’s not kosher.