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Palliative care
Protocol
The provision of medical assistance in dying: protocol for a scoping review
  1. Simon J W Oczkowski1,2,
  2. Ian Ball3,
  3. Carol Saleh4,
  4. Gaelen Kalles2,
  5. Anatoli Chkaroubo2,
  6. Mike Kekewich5,
  7. Paul Miller2,6,
  8. Marianne Dees7,
  9. Andrea Frolic2
  1. 1 Division of Critical Care, Department of Medicine, McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada
  2. 2 Hamilton Health Sciences, Hamilton, Canada
  3. 3 Division of Critical Care Medicine, Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Western University, London, Canada
  4. 4 Department of Medicine, McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada
  5. 5 Department of Clinical and Organizational Ethics, The Ottawa Hospital, Ottawa, Canada
  6. 6 Division of Emergency Medicine, Department of Medicine, McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada
  7. 7 IQ Healthcare, Radboud Institute for Health Sciences, Radboud University Medical Center, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
  1. Correspondence to Dr Simon J W Oczkowski; oczkowsj{at}mcmaster.ca

Abstract

Introduction Medical assistance in dying (MAID), a term encompassing both euthanasia and assisted suicide, was decriminalised in Canada in 2015. Although Bill C-14 legislated eligibility criteria under which patients could receive MAID, it did not provide guidance regarding the technical aspects of providing an assisted death. Therefore, we propose a scoping review to map the characteristics of the existing medical literature describing the medications, settings, participants and outcomes of MAID, in order to identify knowledge gaps and areas for future research.

Methods and analysis We will search electronic databases (MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL, CENTRAL, PsycINFO), clinical trial registries, conference abstracts, and professional guidelines and recommendations from jurisdictions where MAID is legal, up to June 2017. Eligible report types will include technical summaries, institutional policies, practice surveys, practice guidelines and clinical studies. We will include all descriptions of MAID provision (either euthanasia or assisted suicide) in adults who have provided informed consent for MAID, for any reason, including reports where patients have provided consent to MAID in advance of the development of incapacity (eg, dementia). We will exclude reports in which patients receive involuntary euthanasia (eg, capital punishment). Two independent investigators will screen and select retrieved reports using pilot-tested screening and eligibility forms, and collect data using standardised data collection forms. We will summarise extracted data in tabular format with accompanying descriptive statistics and use narrative format to describe their clinical relevance, identify knowledge gaps and suggest topics for future research.

Ethics and dissemination This scoping review will map the range and scope of the existing literature on the provision of MAID in jurisdictions where the practice has been decriminalised. The review will be disseminated through conference presentations and publication in a peer-reviewed journal. These results will be useful to clinicians, policy makers and researchers involved with MAID.

  • Adult Palliative Care
  • Medical Ethics
  • Anaesthetics

This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2017-017888

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    Footnotes

    • Twitter @Simon_Ocz

    • Contributors SJWO conceived the idea for the project and developed the initial draft of the manuscript. All authors developed the review methodology and edited and revised the manuscript for essential content and formatting details, and approved the final version of the manuscript for submission. SJWO and CS will conduct the data collection, data extraction for the review. All authors will contribute to the analysis of the review data.

    • Funding This review was supported by a grant from the Hamilton Academic Health SciencesOrganization Innovation Fund.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Patient consent Not applicable.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

    • Data sharing statement Any unpublished information from the final review will be made available upon request.