-
Elderly couple - Source: ONE News -
Watch Video
-
Related
A leading health care professional is urging a rethink of the way the medical profession and society treats elderly in the final stages of life, calling for greater emphasis on quality of life over life prolonging treatment.
Iona Heath, president of the UK Royal College of GPs, is speaking at the NZ Royal College of GP Conference today and told ONE's Breakfast show that the debate over end of life care is one that society needs to have.
"It depends how much you want to spend to in trying to stop them dying and how much you should be spending in providing a high standard of care for them in their frailty," she said.
Heath believes that too often the focus is on length of life over quality of life.
"There comes a point where we almost use medicine to...torture old people by trying to keep them alive when really they are ready to die," said Heath.
Citing high rates of resuscitation attempts on terminal patients, Heath described such intervention as "increasingly futile".
"If you stop us dying of one thing we'll have to find something else to die of...we have to talk really about what we want to die of."
Heath called for a greater emphasis on nursing and less on medicine.
"The problem with the concentration on what medicine can do for older people is it detracts from what nursing can do for older people in terms of improving their quality of life."
"Rather than trying to treat diseases, we need to spend much more time concentrating on how to make older people more comfortable, how to bring more enjoyment into their lives and less into prescribing...drugs."
She said expectations about what is possible and what is appropriate need to be addressed.
"Doctors are so trained to be active, to intervene, there's always an expectation that there's something you can do.
"Old people themselves are often very realistic about the approach of the end of life...but their relatives are often not quite so realistic...and we don't have the courage as a society to discuss these issues.
