Overview

• The Haute Autorité de santé (HAS) has determined that defining prognostic terms like 'medium-term vital prognosis' is medically unfeasible due to individual variability and lack of consensus.
• HAS experts recommend shifting the focus from temporal prognosis to assessing the quality of a patient's remaining life when determining eligibility for assisted dying.
• Deputies have proposed replacing precise prognostic criteria with the broader term 'phase avancée ou terminale d’une maladie,' which could widen eligibility to include patients with incurable neurodegenerative diseases.
• No European country currently uses time-based prognostic criteria for assisted dying, and Québec has abandoned such an approach after trialing it.
• The French National Assembly will begin a two-week debate on May 12 to finalize the terms of the proposed assisted-dying legislation.