Ten Policy Issues in the Search for a Good Death

1. How we speak about terminal illness must change to reflect long-term dying.
2. Medical training must change to address the care of the dying.
3. Goals of medical treatment must include the need for a good death as well as a cure.
4. Psycho-spiritual support must be offered.
5. Health-care financing must change to reflect chronic illness and long-term dying.
6. Beleaguered families need more support to reflect the realities of modern dying.
7. Drug laws need to change to increase access to narcotic pain medications.
8. Regulations are needed to govern managed care to ensure patient/family decision-making.
9. Stricter guidelines are needed on all end-of-life care to increase patient/family controls.
10. Oregon can now be watched as a pilot model to see if physician aid-in-dying is requested by many patients and if it results in abuses of patients who do not want their deaths hastened.

Taken from Marilyn Webb. The Good Death: The New American Search to Reshape the End of Life. Bantam, 1997; paperback, 1999.