Public health: End of Life Option Act.

Existing law, the End of Life Option Act, authorizes an adult who meets certain qualifications, and who has been determined by his or her attending physician to be suffering from a terminal disease, as defined, to make a request for an aid-in-dying drug for the purpose of ending his or her life. Prior to prescribing an aid-in-dying drug, existing law requires the attending physician to make certain determinations and verify, immediately before writing the prescription for an aid-in-dying drug, that the qualified individual is making an informed decision. Existing law requires the State Department of Public Health to create a report with information collected from attending physician followup forms and to post that report to its Internet Web site. Existing law requires that information to include, among other things, the underlying illness of the qualified individual. Existing law authorizes the Medical Board of California to update the attending physician checklists and forms required under these provisions. This bill would require the report described above to further include the areas of practice of each physician who wrote a prescription for an aid-in-dying drug, the motivating reason or reasons behind a patient's decision to request the aid-in-dying drug, as specified, and the number of patients who received a mental health specialist assessment prior to receiving the aid-in-dying drug. The bill would require the Medical Board of California to make any necessary changes to the applicable forms to conform with these requirements.