Hollywood - Anna Quindlen’s novel, One True Thing, makes a successful transition to screen in the new movie starring Meryl Streep. Despite its fine points, including moving images of how families come together and apart during medical crises the movie includes the myth that autopsies can reveal opioid overdoses and that small increases in morphine can hasten death for dying patients. Most viewers are unlikely to know that hastening death is not likely to result from small increases in medication for patients already being treated with opioids, or that medical examiners cannot pinpoint the dose of opioids a patient has received.
Minneapolis, MN - In August, Minnesota’s new Health Care Directive law, chapters 145B & 145C, went into effect. The new law streamlines and strengthens the use and application of health care directives, and replaces legislation that guided the use of living wills and durable power of attorney for health care forms. The new law strengthens and clarifies all presumptions: that the health care directive is presumed to reflect the principal’s wishes and to be properly executed, that the principal had capacity when the directive was written, and that it is legally sufficient unless there is clear evidence to the contrary. A new addition is the presumption that a pregnant woman unable to make her own decisions and who has not expressed contrary wishes by clear and convincing evidence, would want health care teams to bring her fetus to live birth, if such an outcome fits reasonable medical judgement. Tim A. Thorstenson, Allina Health Systems
New York - Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking, will be the keynote speaker at the First National Conference on Death and Dying in Prisons and Jails: Caring for Prisoners, Families and Caregivers. Co-sponsored by the Center on Crime, Communities & Culture and Project on Death in America of the Open Society Institute, the two-day conference will explore the needs of dying inmates and their caregivers. The conference will be held at the New York Academy of Medicine from November 16-17. Participants will consider how to better advocate for, provide, and administer care to prisoners, and develop recommendations for changes in policies and practices. For more information, visit the PDIA website at www.soros.org/death/pdiacale.html or the CCCC website at www.soros.org/crime/center-events.html or call Bills Gibbs of Imedex, conference secretariat, at 770.751.7332.
New York - The September issue of the PDIA Newsletter features compelling stories about end-of-life care in Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, which recently opened a new prison hospice. Because of Louisiana’s tough sentencing laws, some 85 percent of Angola’s 5,200 inmates will age and die there. The issue also reports on the First International Conference on Research in Palliative Care; PDIA’s meeting about the role of the arts and humanities in shaping how people view death and dying; and the City of Hope National Medical Center’s HOPE (Home care Outreach for Palliative care Education), a palliative care training program for home care nurses. For more information, visit PDIA’s website.
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