The Act Respecting End-of-Life Care ensures that persons at the end of life are provided end-of-life care that is respectful of their dignity and their autonomy and appropriate to their needs, including prevention and relief of suffering.
The Act includes:
- palliative care (including continuous palliative sedation)
- medical aid in dying
- advanced medical directives
To find out more about this act, please visit Quebec.ca.
The responsibilities of the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC) regarding end-of-life care are established in our End-of-Life Care Policy. Three fundamental values guide all end-of-life care:
The respect of the intrinsic value of each person as a unique individual, the respect of the person’s dignity, as well as the recognition of the value of life and the inevitability of death;
The participation of each person in all decisions that concern the person; to this end, all decisions require the person’s free and informed consent and must respect the person’s autonomy. In the event that a person does not have the capacity to make treatment decisions, a surrogate decision maker can consent to care, taking into account any previous wishes the person expressed, and if these wishes are unknown, by making decisions in the person’s best interest. In accordance with the person’s wishes, the person – or surrogate decision maker – shall be informed of everything that concerns him/her, including the person’s true state of health;
The right to compassionate services from caregivers, which shall respect the values that give meaning to the person’s existence and take into account the individual’s culture as well as religious beliefs and practices, within the limits of medical standard of practice and health system resources.
The MUHC’s Division of Supportive and Palliative Care offers compassionate specialized care to patients with life-limiting and terminal illnesses from across Quebec.
Our experienced and dedicated multidisciplinary team strives to improve the quality of life of patients and families, by ensuring that the services we provide meet their physical, psychological, informational and spiritual needs.
The supportive and palliative consultation service includes continuous deep palliative sedation.
Continuous deep palliative sedation is a controlled sedation to the point of unconsciousness in a patient very near death, with the purpose of relieving symptoms that cannot be controlled using other measures.
Although most patients at end of life exhibit suffering that can be controlled to a tolerable level, there are situations when physical and/or psychological distress, even with expert palliative care, precludes any hope for a peaceful death.
Continuous deep palliative sedation is a treatment that may be offered as a last resort to dying patients, when all other treatments of suffering have failed. Common refractory physical reasons for the use of palliative sedation include delirium, dyspnea, pain, and vomiting.
Medical aid in dying (MAiD) is when a doctor or nurse practitioner gives medication, at the request of a person, to end that person’s life and relieve them from constant and unbearable suffering.
To have MAiD, a person must meet strict eligibility criteria.
The MAiD process takes time and planning.
There are two types of MAiD requests in Quebec:
- contemporary MAiD request
- advance request for MAiD
Learn more about the two types of MAiD
Advance medical directive
An advance medical directive is a written document that allows an adult who is capable of giving consent to care to specify in advance the medical care they will agree to or refuse in the event that in the future they become incapable of giving consent to care.
Advance directives apply only to specific clinical situations and may not be used for medical aid in dying.
You can find more information on advance directives, including how to obtain an advance medical directive form, here.
For a list of reports on end-of-life care, please visit this page.