Maisons de soins palliatifs au Québec et aide médicale à mourir : liaisons dangereuses ?

Abstract

The practice of medical aid in dying within palliative care services, and more specifically in hospices in Quebec, questions their raison d’être. This article, based on the clinical ethics method of analysis, aims to analyze the raison d’être of palliative care and hospices as they exist in Quebec, and to put it into perspective with the medical aid in dying recently introduced into these settings. This article identifies the potentially deleterious effects of offering medical aid in dying on the raison d’être of palliative care and, more specifically, of hospices. These effects are temporal (the temporality of the taming of dying), relational (caregiver-patient-family relationships) and community-based (the communities that form with and around patients).