A tribunal has determined a patient with chronic pain has the capacity to request voluntary assisted dying, despite his doctor’s concerns, but has refused to overturn the doctor’s assessment that the patient’s condition was not terminal.

The patient applied for the ACT voluntary assisted dying (VAD) scheme in January, but the co-ordinating doctor said he had unclear capacity and was not reaching the end of his life or facing an advanced condition that was expected to kill him.

The patient then took the doctor to the ACT Civil and Administrative Tribunal, arguing that three unspecified conditions had led to chronic pain syndrome and would ultimately end his life, potentially by driving him to suicide.

“He claims these conditions will reasonably foreseeably cause his death, either through complications arising from a complete loss of mobility and reliance on high-dose sedation, or the intolerable pain leading the applicant to take his own life,” the three-person tribunal wrote.