Free palliative treatment for everyone: that is the call made by the head of Caritas in Vienna, Franz Zdrahal, during the recent Congress on palliative treatment held at the University of Salzburg. Zdrahal, who also fills the post of director of the team of mobile hospices run by Caritas, has warned of a two-tier society, which would inevitably be created if the principle of free palliative treatment to the dying were not to be put into practice. Zdrahal has identified as a further objective for the future “the integration of palliative medicine and the hospice principle in all sectors of the Austrian health system”. “Realistic plans are needed – he said – aimed more at the needs of patients than at those of funding agencies”. During the congress other questions connected with the therapy of pain and palliative treatment were tackled, including that of euthanasia. The Professor of Moral Theology and the Ethics of Medicine Günter Virt spoke of the dangers of going down this road: in Holland, he said, “the main arguments for the legal acceptance of active euthanasia are transparency of treatment and patient autonomy”. However, “neither objective has been achieved. Many patients have been subjected to many forms of pressure, to force them to express the desire to rapidly put an end to their own life. Transparency too in lacking in the Netherlands”, he declared, “since many physicians do not notify the interventions of euthanasia they have practised”. In this context, Virt reported that each year some 1000 cases of not expressly desired euthanasia are registered: “The victims are persons who failed to understand or do not understand what it means to be killed”. The theologian lastly hoped for a better definition of the “ethically significant” difference between killing practiced intentionally through a particular action on the one hand, and allowing a patient to die, on the other.
