Evidence of meeting #11 for Physician-Assisted Dying in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was illness.
A video is available from Parliament.
7:30 p.m.
Liberal
The Joint Chair (Mr. Robert Oliphant) Liberal Rob Oliphant
I think mine is quicker. I think you said earlier that you have a working group established on physician-assisted dying, and that it is in process.
7:30 p.m.
Liberal
The Joint Chair (Mr. Robert Oliphant) Liberal Rob Oliphant
How are you engaging your patient population in that? How many patients are on the working group? You have 30,000 patients you treat every year. How many of them are engaged in your process, and how are they engaged?
7:30 p.m.
Vice-President, Legal Services, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health
Our working group committee is a subcommittee of our medical advisory committee in the hospital. As we indicated, it's an interprofessional group, with legal as well as ethics. We have a representative with our empowerment council, which is a patient advocacy group that works within CAMH but is actually separate from it. Their role on our committee, as well as many other committees within our organization and externally, is to be the patient's voice.
7:30 p.m.
Vice-President, Legal Services, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health
Sorry, it's one patient representative, but she is undertaking, as part of the empowerment council work, consultations external to this committee. So although it's one person who sits on the committee of, I think, seven or eight of us on the working group, the patient's voice is being brought to us through this representative.
7:35 p.m.
Liberal
The Joint Chair (Mr. Robert Oliphant) Liberal Rob Oliphant
Would you call it a patient-centric process? Your minister who funds you, Mr. Hoskins, has suggested that every process in every hospital should be patient-centric. Would you describe that as patient-centric?
7:35 p.m.
Vice-President, Legal Services, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health
Yes, I think so.
We have the clinicians at the table as well as the patient voice. I can assure you that if she didn't feel we were doing a good enough job, she would let us know.
7:35 p.m.
The Joint Chair Hon. Kelvin Kenneth Ogilvie
Thank you very much.
Witnesses, thank you very much for your testimony here. You've all been very articulate, and we thank you very much for that.
Committee, I thank you for your patience.
I need to remind you that in this room, tomorrow afternoon at 4:30, the committee meeting will begin. How it proceeds depends on your House of Commons fellows' decisions tomorrow with regard to their votes.
With that, I declare the meeting adjourned.