Report outlines end-of-life health care options in Oklahoma

Monday, April 11th 2005, 8:27 pm

By: News On 6

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) -- A yearlong study that explored the sensitive issue of end-of-life health care recommends development of uniform advance directives that allow transferal of a terminally ill patient's instructions between nursing homes, hospitals and hospices.

Less than two weeks after the nation's attention was drawn to the bitter court battle surrounding Florida resident Terry Schiavo's death, Attorney General Drew Edmondson on Monday released the findings of a task force study into end-of-life health care in Oklahoma.

"Everyone in this room is going to die," Edmondson said as he outlined the task force's findings in a 38-page report. "That is going to happen whenever God desires that our time has come."

Oklahoma law assumes that individuals want to live and are willing to exhaust all reasonable medical means to stay alive, Edmondson said. "It's appropriate that that should be the law," he said.

But misunderstandings can arise between family members and institutions when critically ill patients choose to die, the attorney general said. Courts have ruled that people have a right to refuse medical treatment.

Edmondson, whose wife, Linda Edmondson of the Oklahoma Association of Healthcare Ethics, was the task force's vice-chair, said Oklahomans of all ages should discuss their end-of-life wishes with family members and complete written advance directives outlining instructions if they become terminally ill.

"It is a vehicle by which you express your wishes," Edmondson said.

He said the document should be simple and easy to understand. It should also be constructed in a way that can follow a patient from a doctor's office to a hospital and anywhere else the patient is treated.

Without written or oral instructions, a legal battle similar to Schiavo's could occur in Oklahoma, he said.

Schiavo, 41, died on March 31, 13 days after the removal of the feeding tube that had kept her alive since 1990. She had suffered severe brain damage when her heart temporarily stopped because of a chemical imbalance, possibly because of an eating disorder.

The incident prompted a prolonged and public right-to-die legal battle between her husband, who argued she had told him long ago that she would not want to be kept alive artificially, and her parents, who held out hope for a miracle recovery for a daughter they said still struggled to talk.

The attorney general's task force report was criticized by Oklahomans for Life, Inc., a Tulsa-based anti-abortion group, who said it is more concerned with facilitating accelerated death than with improving end-of-life health care.

A spokesman for the group, Tony Lauinger, said the report's recommendations were "extremely alarming" and suggested advance directives that make no distinction between a patient's desire for medical care and ordinary food and water.

"It lumps them all together," Lauinger said, adding that Schiavo was "literally starved to death."