PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS PROGRAM HAS BEEN POSTPONED UNTIL SPRING 2020
The Road Traveled Once: Patient Rights and Considerations for the Journey Through Terminal Illness is a 4-week course, taught by attorney and patient rights trailblazer Kathryn Tucker, J.D. Being empowered with this information can change the journey dramatically. This course will cover topics such as:
- How US law has evolved to protect patients’ rights to make decisions about medical treatment;
- How to best prepare oneself, so that these rights and one’s choices will be respected;
- What possible courses of action are available if, despite best planning, these rights are violated.
Explore and discuss some of the difficult questions that inevitably arise when addressing medical care during a terminal illness.
- How much treatment is too much?
- How can one ensure that a family member does not usurp a terminally ill patient’s autonomy?
- Should an advance directive be respected even when a patient who has lost decision-making capacity appears to be content?
This workshop will allow ample time for participants to share personal experiences and concerns, and for discussion of real life scenarios.
POSTPONED UNTIL SPRING 2020
This course is open to all mortals, and may be of particular interest to those caring for others with terminal illness, or managing advanced or terminal illness themselves. There is a minimum enrollment of 6 people, and a maximum enrollment of 20. There will be recommended reading for each session. This course is co-sponsored by the Lopez Island Family Resource Center and the Lopez Island Library. There is a registration fee of $88 per person and $165 per couple. Scholarships are available upon request.
TO SAVE A SPOT, PLEASE CONTACT MALIA@LOPEZLIBRARY.ORG
About the Instructor:
Kathryn L. Tucker, JD, has been living part time on Lopez since 1988. She is Executive Director of the End of Life Liberty Project (ELLP), and has held positions as Executive Director of the Disability Rights Legal Center, the nation’s oldest disability rights advocacy organization, Director of Advocacy and Legal Affairs for Compassion & Choices, and as a practicing private sector attorney with Perkins Coie. She has held faculty appointments as Associate Professor of Law at Loyola Law School and as Adjunct Professor of Law at the University of Washington, Seattle University and Lewis & Clark Schools of Law, teaching “Law, Medicine and Ethics at the End of Life.” Ms. Tucker is recognized as a national leader in spearheading creative and effective efforts to promote improved care for seriously ill and dying patients. She served as co-counsel in the first case in the nation to assert that failure to treat pain adequately constitutes elder abuse, which resulted in a finding of liability and a jury verdict to the patient’s family. She has been principal author of various state legislative measures to ensure physician education in pain management and provision of information to terminally ill patients about end-of-life care options. She also defends physicians facing adverse consequences for treating pain attentively and aggressively. Also experienced and skillful in legislative advocacy, Ms. Tucker was involved in the development of, and successful campaigns to pass, the Washington Death with Dignity Act (2008) and Vermont’s Patient Choice at the End of Life Act (2013). In 2014, Tucker was named a Fulbright Specialist by the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and the Institute of International Education Council for International Exchange of Scholars, to share her scholarship abroad. She served as a Fulbright Specialist with Faculty Appointments at the Universities of Auckland, Canterbury and Otago in 2015; in 2019 Tucker received another Fulbright Specialist Grant to teach at law schools in the United Kingdom.