Whilst the death of my father came as no surprise, the manner of his exit remains saddening and disorienting for my family. We have decided to share his experience and convey some of his concerns about current voluntary assisted dying (VAD) legislation. Getting legislation right was a matter of basic human dignity and justice in his view. He recognised that the repercussions of unjust VAD legislation touch us all.

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Who would have known that my father knew how to schedule the delivery of his very last email, some 12 hours after he enacted his plan B - to voluntarily end his life. This email went to local MLAs, VAD administrators and advocates, the ACT Human Rights Commission and local journalists.

The first line reads: "I write to explain why I have had to end my life without the assistance of the VAD mechanism. I also write in the hope that my experience - and the experience of others like me - might lead to a change that helps those who follow."

My father's pain had become intolerable. He applied to access VAD, but because his health problems were not terminal, access was denied. He fell into definitional gaps that haunt VAD legislation.

This legislation currently relies on the biomedical model - a model that characterises health in crude and arguably cruel biological terms. In contrast, there is a more persuasive and more widespread view, among medical practitioners and researchers, that health is best understood in bio-psycho-social terms. Through this lens, health is much more than the state of the body, reduced to numbers and medical terms. Health is influenced by our social relations and internal lives.

Deterioration in any of those domains signals a departure from health. The precise trajectory of that departure from health is difficult to determine. The lived experience of suffering is subjective and the time until death is unpredictable.

Suffering is a private and inscrutable experience. Clinicians and clinical assessments that prioritise the biomedical model fail to appreciate this. And this failure has the potential to produce profound injustices with tormenting repercussions.

Do we accept the suffering that the blunt application of........

© Canberra Times