Physicians For Compassionate Care Education Foundation
Our Mission
Physicians for Compassionate Care is an association of physicians and other health care professionals dedicated to preserving the traditional relationship between health care professional and patient as one in which the health care professional’s primary task is to heal when possible, comfort always, and never intentionally harm.
The association promotes the health and well being of patients by encouraging health care professionals to comfort patients and to assist those who are dying by support systems, minimizing pain, and treating depression. The association affirms the health-restoring role of the health care professional and works to educate the profession and the public to the dangers of euthanasia and assisted suicide. As physicians, we come from primary care specialties as well as subspecialties. We work for mutual support among health care professionals and to speak out for the inherent value of human life.
PCCEF Position on the Duty and Role of Physicians and other Health Care Professionals
Health care professionals have the duty to safeguard human life, especially life of the most vulnerable: the sick, elderly, disabled, poor, ethnic minorities, and those whom society may consider the most unproductive and burdensome. All knowledge, skills and compassion are to be used in caring for and supporting the patient and never to intentionally cause death. A professional-patient relationship built upon trust is an essential asset and is for the protection of patients.
Physicians for Compassionate Care Education Foundation is not affiliated with any religious or political organization. What unites PCCEF members is the conviction that human life has value and that assisted suicide and euthanasia are unethical and are not part of medical care.
PCCEF Position on Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia
Physicians for Compassionate Care opposes assisted suicide and euthanasia because:
Both undermine trust in the patient-health care professional relationship.
Both change the role of the physician or other health care professional in society from the traditional role of healer to that of an executioner.
Both endanger the value that society places on life, especially for those who are most vulnerable and who are near the end of life.
Legalization of assisted suicide or euthanasia creates a discriminatory two-tiered system of health care, where patients who want to hasten their deaths are placed in two classes: (1) a protected group that get standard mental health services, or (2) a marginalized group consisting of those with the disability of terminal illness who can be provided substandard care that includes lethal drugs.
How Donations Are Used
We use donations for providing educational materials about both the problems with assisted suicide and euthanasia and the possibilities for good end-of-life care. Officers of PCCEF are unpaid volunteers.
