We actually teach also. We never abandon the patient.
There was a comment made about having to choose between MAID and palliative care. If the person's receiving palliative care, they can continue to receive palliative care right up to the time they have MAID. We don't intend it ever to have to stop unless the patient does not want to continue with palliative care. It's always available.
We teach, and we taught for years and years before this became available, that when someone says they think life's not worth living, we start by exploring that. We inquire, “What do you mean by that?”, so they can say, “I don't feel I want to live anymore.” Then we talk about what the root cause of that is. That's one thing that is lacking in a lot of the assessments for MAID when palliative care is not involved. The assessment involves only whether they qualified for MAID; it doesn't ask what the root cause of someone's suffering is and how we can fix that.