Coffs Harbour Historic Cemetery.

Coffs Coast Advocate

IT is a great place to live and a great place to visit – but Coffs Harbour is also now a great place to die.

That’s according to one of Australia’s foremost authorities on ageing, Professor Colleen Cartwright.

“It’s probably not something you would want to put on tourist brochures but I find it very gratifying that Coffs Harbour really is one of the best places to end your life with dignity,” Prof Cartwright said.

“And that’s all due to the ageing culture we have developed here,” she said.

The internationally recognised academic is based at the local campus of Southern Cross University where she heads the Aged Services Learning and Research Centre.

While Prof Cartwright has long been involved in issues surrounding frail older people living in the community and in aged care, she said she has increasingly become engaged in the debate about dying. She particularly welcomed the intellectual and emotional stimulus provided by Monday night’s ABC 4 Corners program about palliative care.

“We need to have an open debate about dying, and about the dignity of dying,” Prof Cartwright said.

“And we need to distinguish between what is and isn’t euthanasia. People get confused but in my mind prolonging a life full of pain is little more than abuse. We need to understand that sometimes medical intervention merely prolongs death rather than prolongs life.”

In the 4 Corners program, the director of the Sacred Heart Palliative Care Unit in Sydney, Dr Richard Chye, argued that the medical community’s obsession with curing sickness is leaving some terminally ill patients poorly cared for and unprepared for death.

As well Prof Ken Hillman, from the University of NSW, said too many very ill patients end up in acute-care hospital wards when, in fact, they would be better off in other settings to die peacefully.

“We want to look after them. We want to cure them. And in doing so we’ve set up a situation where it’s difficult to die peacefully,” Prof Hillman said.

Prof Cartwright said giving people the option of dying ‘on their own terms’ was at the core of initiatives developed in Coffs Harbour over the past decade that had made the city a better place to pass over.

“In our residential aged care system people now don’t have to go to hospitals to die,” Prof Cartwright said. “They can be left to die in their familiar environment rather than in the acute care ward of a hospital. It is a much more dignified option.”

Prof Cartwright said the obsession of some doctors to unnecessarily prolong life inevitably left many carers angry and bitter.

“All they can do is interrupt the dying path. All they do is put obstacles in place but they can only delay not defy the process of dying. Stopping or removing futile treatments is not euthanasia. It is humane.”

Professor Cartwright said people needed to know that in Australia people have a legal right to refuse food and medication, and the ability to make out Advance Health Care Directives which detail their dying wishes.