Legal Aspects of End of Life and End Stage Disease

End-of-life care providers to patients in the later stages of the disease are potentially exposed to a variety of judicial, legal and professional problems. This study was to review and analyze these challenges and ways to deal with them.

In this systematic review study, some aspects of end-of-life care such as patient decision-making competence, discontinuation of life support treatments and useless or ineffective treatments and requesting death assistance with targeted search in 8 databases and reviewing 44 sources, from a legal point of view. An analysis was made.

The biggest challenges in the field of assisting in the death of patients, choosing the right person to decide in the final stages and ending the treatment were seen as useless or ineffective. In many countries, laws were enacted to discontinue life-sustaining treatments, and the process of judicial proceedings was to accept the requests of patients or their alternative representatives. Gradually, more and more countries have legalized end-of-life assistance in terms of conditional assistance.

The legal challenges to end-of-life and how to deal with it vary in different societies and legal intervention in end-of-life lawsuits be avoided as much as possible.