Institutional Responses to Voluntary Assisted Dying: An Empirical Study in Victoria and Western Australia

Patients seeking to access voluntary assisted dying (VAD) are necessarily at the end of their lives. Hence, they are likely to be concurrently receiving care from institutions (community nursing services, health services, palliative care services, and aged care facilities) with different levels of participation in VAD. This article reports on the various institutional approaches to VAD based on eighteen semi-structured interviews with regulators from Victoria and Western Australia, representing fifteen institutions with varying levels of support for VAD. We generated five main themes from reflexive thematic analysis of the interview data: settling on a position; operationalizing a position and determining level of involvement; local policy decisions on specific VAD activities; transparency; and navigating pluralism and accommodating diverse views. Overall, our findings revealed significant diversity in how institutions approached various VAD activities and that an institution's position on VAD (whether it supports it or not) does not necessarily indicate the extent to which it will facilitate access to VAD. These findings may have relevance for institutions seeking to implement (or revise) their approach to VAD and suggest that greater transparency about institutional approaches to VAD is needed to enable people to make informed decisions about where to seek care.