PWPL first posted about Annie Farlow here. Now her parents have taken a complaint to the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal about the care she received (or did not receive) at Sick Kids Hospital in Toronto. The question remains of how a “do not resuscitate” order was issued without the parents knowledge. You can watch a bit of the story from CTV News here. Scroll down to the story called “Parents aim complaint at Sick Kids.”
Many today seem to live in the zone of personal choice, and having control–even over life and death. I don’t agree with this world view. But it seems pretty clear in this case that the Farlows were denied “the right to choose”–the right to choose life for their daughter.
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Nice to see a case involving a violation of real human rights being brought before one of these tribunals. I’ll be interested to see how Barbara Hall and co. handle this one.
Why isn’t this case being brought before a real judge and a real court?
I want to respond to BillyHW’s comment.
Civil law deals with violations of law, in this case, the Health Care Consent Act. In the case of a consent situation, it is necessary to prove that treatment was provided without consent AND the treatment that ultimately transpired would be what a “reasonable” person would have chosen.
That is pretty challenging when the issue is quality of life. Is a reasonable choice the majority choice in that regard? In any case, the only real remedy the civil court can offer is financial. Actually, we have a small claims case in civil court. The hospital is threatening to move it to Superior Court. If we won (big if, because the judge would likely just apply the ‘balance of probabilities’ and consider the outcome for the genetic label, we might win 50k and if we lost, we would risk maybe 200k. It is not about money anyways.
Human rights considers thing like mistreatment and suffering. Annie was not provided with a diagnosis and many something simple like CPAP might have helped her. As her respiratory distress worsened, we were told they would do diagnostics later, “if symptoms persist”. Meanwhile, Annie was enduring gradual asphyxiation.
Until the last 3.5 hours when there seemed to be a hay-day of narcotics violations, Annie was not offered any comfort measures.
The human rights remedies come in the form of orders for the hospital to improve ethics and in the form of ordering an admission of violation of human rights.
Sadly, we tried to obtain an effective remedy for two years. (you should see the documentation) and when the President of Sickkids reneged on her offer to let us present to the board we realized that there was no position of trust to move forward.
That good will attempt may very well restrict the complaint from moving forward as the complaint ultimately was made too late as a result.
Annie was not in a persistive vegetative state by any means. She was not on life support. If placing a DNR with no consent and incurring multiple narcotic violations is acceptable for her, then there are many people in Ontario hospitals at risk.
Annie’s mom