The Parliament of New South Wales passed the Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2022 (the Act) on 19 May 2022 and on 28 November 2023 The Act was implemented to allow eligible people the choice to access voluntary assisted dying in NSW.
Voluntary Assisted Dying is embedded within each local health district's end-of-life care pathways and patients must be informed about all options available to them including palliative care, and other treatment options in line with their goals of care.
A person's decision to seek information about, or access to, Voluntary Assisted Dying has no impact on the person's access to high-quality palliative care.
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For years as an award-winning war reporter, Sebastian Junger traveled to many front lines and frequently put his life at risk. And yet the closest he ever came to death was the summer of 2020 while spending a quiet afternoon at the New England home he shared with his wife and two young children. Crippled by abdominal pain, Junger was rushed to the hospital by ambulance. Once there, he began slipping away. As blackness encroached, he was visited by his dead father, inviting Junger to join him. "It's okay," his father said. "There's nothing to be scared of. I'll take care of you." That was the last thing Junger remembered until he came to the next day when he was told he had suffered a ruptured aneurysm that he should not have survived.
This experience spurred Junger--a confirmed atheist raised by his physicist father to respect the empirical--to undertake a scientific, philosophical, and deeply personal examination of mortality and what happens after we die. How do we begin to process the brutal fact that any of us might perish unexpectedly on what begins as an ordinary day? How do we grapple with phenomena that science may be unable to explain? And what happens to a person, emotionally and spiritually, when forced to reckon with such existential questions?
In My Time of Dying is part medical drama, part searing autobiography, and part rational inquiry into the ultimate unknowable mystery.
