Patients Kept Alive For Longer Because Doctors ‘Don’t Know Dying Wishes’

TERMINAL patients are being kept alive with unwanted and unnecessary life-prolonging treatments because doctors do not know what their final wishes are, new research reveals.

The research also shows one in seven Australian physicians report seeing patients continuing to receive treatments on a weekly basis to keep them alive, which may be contrary to their wishes, leading calls for an overhaul of end-of-life care in Australia.

While the euthanasia debate continues to rage in Australia, a Royal Australasian College of Physicians survey of more than 15,000 doctors reveals a much greater problem impacting many times more Australians because doctors do not routinely discuss treatment options with their patients.

Eight out of 10 doctors believe physicians do not know what their patient’s wishes are nearing the end of their life.

The report, to be presented today at the Royal Australasian College of Physicians congress in Cairns, calls for doctors to be better trained to document a patient’s wishes for such things as life-support treatments, hospitalisation and where they would like to die.


RACP end-of-life working party chair Associate Professor Bill Silvester said documenting a person’s final wishes needed to be done in the same way as their organ donation preferences or will writing.

“There are a lot of things happening in hospitals that really should not be happening if we were all doing a better job of talking to patients about what they want and getting it put on the electronic alert system so if somebody suddenly deteriorates people don’t go doing things to people they never actually wanted done,” he said.

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