On December 3, 2015, the Health Minister announced a new development plan 2016-2018 for palliative care, with a budget of 190 million Euros, with 40 million attributed for 2016. This was the follow-up to the promise made by President François Hollande in July 2012 which had gone unheeded.
The objective of this plan is to create new palliative care units and mobile teams for palliative care, with better territorial distribution. It also comprises creating a specific university sector, with an academic staff dedicated to palliative care, as well as a national information campaign on the advance directives.
For Alliance VITA, this plan arriving almost 3 years late does not respond to current challenges. It is actually 500 million Euros over five years which are necessary to respond to the needs of accompanying those at the end of life in France. As a member of Relieve suffering without killing, Alliance VITA supports their proposal for a dual vigilance plan: vigilance on the application of the law concerning the end of life, which entails risks of drifting towards euthanasia, and vigilance on the practical and effective implementation of the government’s proposed plan.
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Press release from Soulager mais pas Tuer (Relieve suffering without killing), December 3, 2015
Palliative care: an insufficient plan after 3 years of accumulated delay!
For Relieve suffering without killing, the development plan for palliative care announced today can only partially make up for the unfair delay accumulated since 2012.
To date, the public authorities haven’t kept their promises for the development plan for palliative care made by the President of the Republic in July 2012. Right in the middle of the debate on the end of life, the plan announced at the end of 2015 is bewildering: will it be able to catch up with the accumulated delay over 3 years? Indeed France has long known a situation of patchy end of life health care and training programs proposed in this domain, without mentioning the great disparities between regions.
To only budget 190 million Euros over three years starting in 2016, is still insufficient to respond to the needs of accompanying those at the end of life, since we had estimated, as early as 2013, a need of 500 million Euros over five years.
This is why relieve Suffering without killing has announced the launch of a dual vigilance plan:
Vigilance on the application of the law concerning the end of life, which entails risks of drifting towards euthanasia, which appears as a menace the very essence of palliative care;
And vigilance on the effective implementation of the announced plan and its adequacy to the real needs of the French.
Often presented as a way of bargaining the endorsement of the law concerning the end of life, law which is both useless and dangerous, the new plan would also have an alarming scope if it led to a confusion between palliative care and euthanasia, via protocols for terminal sedation with deprival of nutrition and hydration that the law for the end of life may well encourage.
