This article presents what the Queensland parliament has produced for regulating voluntary assisted dying. And this is compared with what the Victorian parliament has given for rules. Below is my understanding of what the article says about the Queensland rules >
A "medical practitioner" may start a conversation with a patient about volunteering to die. And he or she may actually suggest that the patient volunteers to be assisted to die.
But what if a doctor finds it would be wrong to help a patient to die? He or she must give the patient information about someone else who the doctor believes will help the patient to die. He or she does not have the choice to just stay totally out of it, then. But the article does not say the doctor must give an actual referral to another medical person who helps with voluntary dying; it says he or she must give information, and this I would say is not the same as a referral.
In case a facility does not want to be involved with assisting the voluntary dying by patients, an outside medical person has legal power to visit a patient in that facility and help the person to die there or to be moved to somewhere else to die.
Well, if I do not want anything to do with this, I can simply refuse to have anything to do with this. Now, yes, I might loose my license, but Jesus says this evil world will hate and kill us. But I would trust God about how things would go.
I see one practical possibility. This Queensland thing says I could be a patient and my doctor could come to see me, one day, and say, "Oh I think it would be a good idea for you to volunteer to have me help you do die." Well, I would think there would need to be regulations about when and if a doctor or some other professional may come and recommend this to me.
They would likely need to draw some lines. How old should I be? How much would emotional suffering have to do with it? If I am broke and the insurance people or the state people are tired of paying my bills, how much may this have to do with if they suggest I volunteer to die? How much suffering is necessary to excuse me to get assisted dying if I want it?
So . . . then . . . I suppose the lawmakers need to have regulations and there would need to be training . . . so pros don't just come up to any patient and say, "Oh, I think it would be good for you to die with our help and would you like to volunteer for this?"
So, how could someone with a functioning conscience get around being required to be involved with this? I can say, no I am not interested in being trained for that medical specialty. And our facility does not have people who are trained for that. After all, it is supposed to be a medical procedure . . . both the assisting physically and the counseling; and we are not interested in specializing in that. And this includes that we are not going to be trained for making referrals for that, since referrals for that are for something so specialized; plus we don't know the practitioners well enough to know if it would be ethical to name them in information; and therefore we can not inform a patient of someone we are not competent enough to know is able to do the procedure. So . . . not that, not here, not me.
By the way > right now where I am, there are medical people whom I might ask about certain things, including alternative medical workers, and they just say, "I don't know." I talked with one person about chiropractor, and she just said she did not know about it. If you are not an expert about voluntary dying by a patient and if you don't well know the ones practicing it, how can you in good conscience even give information about it or the ones doing it??
We already have enough to do, in our facility. We don't have time for that training. We are already studying and training in other fields. If we help people to think about dying, this could keep them from preparing to live better near the end of their lives, when God can have us growing even more in how to love.
