Feedback about details of the funding of assisted dying services

Overview

Kia ora

The Ministry of Health is responsible for implementing the End of Life Choice Act, and assisted dying need to be in place from 7 November 2021.

Recently Cabinet made some decisions around how assisted dying services will be funded. We would like to invite your organisation to provide feedback on some of the details related to this funding, which is captured in a draft section 88 Notice, and accompanying service description.

We appreciate you taking the time to provide feedback. Your feedback is important because it will inform the final version of the notice and service description which will support funding of the assisted dying service.

You will need to refer to copies of the draft Assisted Dying Services Notice 2021 and the draft service description, along with any feedback you have already collated from your organisation to complete this survey.

• Assisted Dying Notice 2021 (PDF, opens in new tab)
• Service Description (PDF, opens in new tab)

We ask that each organisation provides a single response by midnight on 27 July 2021.

Further information and engagement on assisted dying

There is understandably a lot of interest in the implementation and the Ministry has sought to engage a wide range of stakeholders. To date, this has included:

• Regular meetings with organisations from the health and disability sector, including professional colleges, responsible authorities, unions and other health and disability organisations
• Engagement with Māori stakeholders, including Māori-led primary health organisations and general practices
• A survey of the health workforce to gain understanding of workforce knowledge, understanding and attitudes of practitioners about the Act. A second survey is currently open for feedback – Workforce Survey July - End of Life Choice Act – and a third one is planned for September.

If your organisation has wider questions about how assisted dying will operate that go beyond funding, it may be useful to look at:

• The Ministry of Health’s website: End of Life Choice Act implementation
• The information sheets for health professionals and health service providers
• The End of Life Choice Act 2019: Overview e-learning module, which is available now through LearnOnline.
• Attending monthly assisted dying implementation webinars – you can sign up to our next webinar now.

You can also find the End of Life Choice Act 2019 in full at: https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2019/0067/latest/DLM7285905.html

There will be further opportunities to engage and input into supporting materials and guidance related to assisted dying between now and November (in addition to the workforce surveys), including:

• Engagement by the SCENZ group on developing the clinical guidance for administering medicines
• Regular meetings with our network of health and disability stakeholders.

Next steps

Once we have received all submissions, we intend to collate your feedback and provide it to the Minister. We also intend to send participants the summary of feedback after this process has been completed. Your feedback will help to inform the Minister of any changes to the notice and service description before they are published and in place for 7 November 2021.

If you have any other questions you can contact EOLC@health.govt.nz

Thank you for your feedback.